Safer to Be in Chains
by Lorendiac
Summary: Cathy Webster—Free Spirit, one of Captain America's apprentices—seems to bump into another obscure villainess every time she turns around. Sometimes she fights, sometimes she lies, sometimes they offer her a job . . .
1. Chapter 1: Handcuffs

**Author's Note: **"Free Spirit" is Cathy Webster, who was an apprentice of Captain America's for awhile in the mid-90s and hasn't been seen doing much of anything in the Marvel Universe since then. She is the narrator; this story is set back in that mid-90s era when she was still a rookie receiving regular training from Cap and then going out on the streets and trying to bridge the gap between theory and practice. If you want to know how to visualize her, click on my name and follow the "Free Spirit" link near the top of my Profile.

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**Chapter One: Handcuffs **

The cop's nametag said he was "P. Alonso." I didn't know the full story, but he must have handcuffed the suspect's right wrist to his own left wrist before losing consciousness. Now the suspect was kneeling beside the officer, searching for the right key to liberate himself from two hundred pounds of inert police officer. He didn't see me yet; I had just now come down the stairs into the basement of the building.

I stood there for a minute and let him find the handcuff key and unlock the cuff on the officer's wrist. Then I said sweetly, "Don't bother unlocking the other one, sir. I'd just have to snap it back on!"

His head jerked around. (_Male Caucasian, probably under thirty, blue eyes, sandy hair underneath a Yankees baseball cap, freckles, pug nose, thin moustache,_ I noted automatically.) Something about his body language gave me the idea that he briefly pondered the pros and cons of trying to yank Officer Alonso's gun from the holster—but I could be doing him an injustice. He didn't actually reach for it and from his current angle he couldn't possibly have gotten it out quickly enough to do him any good. He tried a different approach.

"Are you a superhero? Great to see you!" he said heartily. "I think this poor policeman had a heart attack! I was planning to run and call 911 as soon as I could get loose, but now you can—while I stay to give CPR!" The funny thing was how incredibly sincere and convincing he sounded. But when a man is handcuffed to a cop as I first meet him, I don't give him much benefit of the doubt.

"Somehow, sir, I just don't feel right about leaving him alone and helpless_ with you,_" I said pointedly. "So I think we'll go find a phone or police radio _together._"

His eyes widened and he looked absolutely horrified at my insinuation. "Surely you don't think I'd be so unsporting as to abuse a helpless man? A paladin of law and order? Even if he did arrest me in a misguided fit of zeal?"

"I don't know you, do I? Perhaps Unsporting is your middle name." I didn't believe the "heart attack" story, but I still crouched down on the other side of the cop and checked for a pulse in his throat. Felt strong and steady—he was unconscious, but if I were a gambler, I'd bet twenty-to-one that it wasn't because of inherent health problems. No blood anywhere in sight, no clear sign of any head injuries—what had kayoed him?

The suspect's free hand had slipped into a pocket of his leather jacket and now it was coming out again. I chopped at his wrist and he yelped. It should be at least a minute or two before he could really use that hand again. Meanwhile, the temporary numbing of his hand caused a hypodermic to slip through his fingers and roll on the floor. I checked his jacket and found two more hypos, one fully loaded and one almost empty. "Was this what you used on the cop?"

He sighed theatrically. "You're terribly suspicious, you know that? I just happen to feel the need to give myself another allergy shot so I can keep breathing comfortably at this time of year, and then you—"

"The forensics people will nail it down, then. Comparing the contents of these needles to whatever they find in this poor man's bloodstream." I slipped all three hypos into a plastic evidence bag. Then I glared at him and said, "Turn around and put your hands together behind your back." One cuff was still attached to his right wrist and I was going to put the other one on his left. That would make him a lot less dangerous when we went looking for a way to call the local cops.

He didn't cooperate. His eyes widened and he stared frantically over my shoulder. He snapped, "Look out!" and I frowned because even a rookie superhero knows that's the oldest trick in the book. How gullible did he think I was?

"Warning her? Now that wasn't nice, Fortescue," said a contralto voice with a bit of Texas in it. "A girl might almost think you ain't glad to see her!"

I thought I saw a flash of panic in his—Fortescue's?—eyes before I rose and swiveled around to see the new arrival. But even as I did, he was saying in a warm tone, "What? No, I was trying to warn _you_ off, Laralie! She's one of those superheroes; no telling what she might do!"

"That's right sweet of you, Fort," said the voice with a clear note of skepticism—and now I could see the speaker.

My first impression was that I _loved_ her patriotic color scheme. Beyond that, she seemed to be going for the cowgirl look. Red fringed boots, blue jeans, white gloves, and a long-sleeved red checked shirt that was knotted across the middle of her chest instead of properly buttoned, thereby showing quite a bit of skin above and below. Pearl-handled revolvers in white holsters on her hips, a white cowboy hat, and blond hair. (Later, as she moved around, I realized most of her hair was in a very long ponytail hanging down her back.) Her hands were currently occupied with a rope with a big loop at one end.

Cap had made me study dossiers on a few hundred costumed characters and this one looked familiar. "Wrangler." A mercenary. She'd fought Cap and she'd fought the Black Widow (not simultaneously).

"Howdy," she said politely. "Honey, I don't _know_ who you are and I don't _care._ No need for a ruckus between us; I've got other fish to fry. What say you just mosey along with no hard feelings?"

I smiled. "I was about to say much the same! I want to call an ambulance for that police officer and I want to hand this other fellow over to the authorities. As long as you don't interfere, there's no problem!" (As far as I knew, there were no outstanding warrants against her at the moment, so I was ready to take a live-and-let-live attitude if she'd reciprocate. One problem at a time, please!)

She sighed. Apparently it wasn't going to be that easy to settle this one. "So we're laying our cards on the table, honey? Okay, I'll tell you how it stands. If you want to pick up that cop and lug him up the stairs, go for it! I don't mind! But I've got some unfinished business with Fortescue here, so if you leave _him_ behind, I promise he _won't_ just get off with a slap on the wrist for any crimes he's committed lately. Does that make you feel better?" She was slowly twirling her lasso as she spoke, and the tight grin on her face suggested unpleasant things for Fortescue.

I blinked at the implications of her offer. Was she trying to set herself up as a female Punisher? No, she probably had her own grudge against him. But she was trying to persuade me to think of it as "justice"—even if her reasons for hurting him (or killing him?) wouldn't be the same as the law's reasons.

I had never practiced fighting a lasso. If she sent the loop sailing toward me, should I duck and then move toward her fast, or try to grab hold of the rope for leverage? I was trying to find the right words to stall for time when I suddenly heard a **Click!** and felt something press against my left wrist. I spun around and saw that Fortescue had just snapped the other cuff onto me. Even as I reached toward him, his left hand flashed and a shiny bit of metal sailed through the air and disappeared into what appeared to be an overloaded garbage can.

Wrangler laughed at the situation as I spun my head again to monitor her activities. She might have snared me with that lasso when I was distracted, but she hadn't bothered. Through gritted teeth, I asked Fortescue, "What was that all about?"

"Now you have to stay close and protect me," he said simply.

"What, you thought I was just going to bail out and let her skin you alive and then tan the hide, or whatever she has in mind?"

"It was possible!" he said defensively. "After all, I'd—" He broke off suddenly, but I got the drift. That was what he would have done if the shoe were on the other foot.

"Yes, he would," Wrangler said agreeably, responding to what he hadn't finished saying. "Just like he'd sweet-talk a girl into letting him invest the bounty money she'd just collected on a job, and then disappear with it instead of coming back for the candlelit dinner he said he couldn't hardly wait for!"

"Ah," I said, the light dawning. "He's a con man!"

"Yup. Real charmer. Back in the old days, he would have made a great snake oil salesman. Now he thinks chaining himself to you and throwing away the key is going to keep him safe. Although frankly, honey, I reckon he'd have done better to leave you your mobility and count on your 'sense of duty.' I got the feeling you just weren't feeling right about sashaying out of here and letting me teach him some proper manners."

"I'm getting more tempted by the minute," I growled. "I don't suppose you know how to pick the locks on police handcuffs?" (Cap probably knew, but so far the subject had never come up in my training exercises. I made a mental note to mention it next time.)

"Nope. I admit it's a bit of a problem. Like I said, I've got no beef with you, honey. But the two of you seem to be a package deal at the moment. You can have a few minutes to search that cop for a spare key, or go rummage around for the one Fort threw away—I can wait a mite!" As an afterthought, she added, "I'd offer to shoot through the middle of 'em for you so you each ended up with a separate bracelet, but I'm afraid stray bits of metal might fly off any which way and gouge your hide something awful. No big deal in Fort's case, but I don't want to do that to an innocent bystander."

"I appreciate that," I said politely. "It's a good point about this officer's keys; he might very well keep spares for a rainy day. I'll take you up on that part of the offer. Whatever happens later, at least it won't be so messy."

"I ain't going anywhere." She stopped twirling her lasso, presumably to let her arm rest for a minute. But she was about thirty feet away and I was sure she could react swiftly with rope or gun if Fortescue and I tried to rush her.

I stepped carefully over the officer and crouched down on his left side. "Okay, you check the pockets on your side and I'll check mine," I said. I gave Fortescue a wink that was supposed to reassure him, and hoped he could read lips as I mouthed silently:_Diversion._ If he could do something to buy me at least a few seconds. . . .

Fortescue got that panicked look in his eyes again and then did something I never thought he'd be dumb enough to do. He yanked at the unconscious cop's holstered gun. Well, it was a diversion!

Wrangler yelled and made a fast draw. A gun barked in her left hand and there was a noise of metal bouncing off metal. Fortescue jerked and the tremor was transmitted through the cuff to my left arm, but it didn't stop my right hand from getting a good grip on the police officer's nightstick where it stuck through a loop on his left side, which was all I had wanted. Wrangler was saying sadly, "You really shouldn't have tried that, Fort. Now I've got to—" but, before she could finish her sentence, I was throwing that nightstick for all I was worth from thirty feet away.

A year ago I never would have tried that, because it probably would have flown off sideways and beaned a kid or something . . . but what Superia did for my coordination has got to be seen to be believed. One end of the nightstick clocked Wrangler on the forehead and she staggered. The gun she had just used clattered on the concrete floor.

"Come on!" I snapped at Fortescue, and tugged him along as I sprinted across the basement. Do him justice; he kept up with me once he got the idea. We had to get to Wrangler before she recovered and started blazing away with her other gun.

We did. She wasn't out cold, but from the way she was groaning and clutching at her head, she wasn't going to put up much of a fight. I kicked her fallen gun far across the room, pulled out her other gun and threw it after, and then hog-tied her with her own lasso—slightly hindered in the process by having a criminal chained to my wrist, although he kept quiet and didn't try to interfere. Then I retrieved the fallen nightstick. The mood I was in, if Fortescue had tried to touch it first—or any other weapon—I think I would have hurt him pretty badly and called it self-defense. I guess he'd figured that out without being told; he was meek as a lamb while I was wrapping up his ex-girlfriend, or latest victim, or whatever the exact relationship ought to be called. (Just _how much_ had he done to "charm" her into trusting him with money? I decided I really didn't want to know.) By the way, Laralie was apparently one of those sharpshooters who liked to show off; the sole shot she'd fired had knocked the cop's Glock out of Fortescue's hand without actually hurting him. Just numbed his hand all over again from the shock.

When I was ready to leave, I twirled the nightstick in my free hand and said to Fortescue, "You lead the way up the stairs; I follow. Then we call the authorities. Give me any more grief and I'll invoke the bit about 'spare the rod and spoil the child'—meaning the swindler with a small child's self-centered mentality, in this context."

"I never took you for such an Old Testament kind of girl," he complained as we proceeded up the stairs. "And so judgmental! Haven't you heard there are always two sides to the story?"

"Sure, but I _don't really care_ what your side is. Why should I? Save it for the judge!"

When we got to the ground floor, I steered him toward the nearest exit. As he led the way out into the sunlight, a woman's voice said, "Hello, Fort! Great to see you again! I let Wrangler have first dibs, but if you got away from her, you're fair game now!"

(Did you ever get the feeling it was going to be one of those days?)


	2. Chapter 2: Besieged

**Chapter Two: Besieged**

I yanked Fortescue back in through the doorway just before the energy blast coming from the left side sizzled through the air where he had been standing a moment earlier. I had only caught a quick glimpse, but I thought the woman in a green scaly bodysuit, fancy yellow mask, gray wings rising behind her, was "Dragoness." I didn't know much about her, but I had seen her photo in an Avengers file on the terrorist outfit known as "the Mutant Liberation Front."

"Back door!" gasped Fortescue as we scurried through the entry hall of the apartment building.

"No," I overruled him. "She can fly, right? So we'll never outrun her in the streets—she'd just soar above us and keep blasting down at our heads. We want her to come in after us where the close quarters should cramp her style!" 

I shoved him back toward the stairs we'd so recently ascended from the basement. With any luck, Dragoness would parallel Fortescue's chain of thought and expect us to dash straight through the building and out the other side. She might fly over and try to cut us off at the pass! Let her waste a minute or two flapping around in circles out there, trying to figure out which door or window we were planning to use as an exit if we thought she was on the far side of the building at the moment. It might take her awhile to decide we had gone to ground.

"Talk to me, Fortescue," I said softly as we scrambled into the stairwell. "Tell me about her powers! What can she do to us?"

"Tamara can fire bioelectric blasts from her hands and make lightshows. The costume lets her fly; not a genetic power. That's about it."

"Are you sure? What about super-strength, super-senses, telepathy, anything that would make it easier for her to find us or harder for me to faze her with a good punch?"

"None of the above. Just energy and the flying suit."

"Fine, fine. Hold still and shush until I say differently." If she was normal flesh and blood inside her suit, then I shouldn't have much trouble handling her if she got within arm's reach before she spotted me. She probably depended on her power to blast enemies out of the way and didn't spend those long hard hours practicing the conventional hand-to-hand methods.

I was still holding the nightstick I'd taken from that unfortunate police officer downstairs and I was just two steps down inside the stairwell. If Dragoness came in after us and started searching the place, the stairwell was the only way down to the basement. She'd have to come down the hallway to get here. And when she appeared in the doorframe, we'd see whose reflexes were faster. I was betting on mine. Hit her upside the head just right and it would be good night, Gracie!

Fortescue was standing just below me in the stairwell so he wouldn't block my efforts to defend him. I didn't trust him, but I didn't think he'd try to attack me as long as angry villainesses were in the neighborhood and apparently hunting his scalp. I wanted to ask him just what he had done to Dragoness so I could gauge how angry she was, which might help me estimate how long she'd stick around when she must realize the police might show up if someone had already spotted her blasting at Fortescue and made a phone call to 911—but I didn't want his answer to give away our location if she was close enough to hear a whisper. No telling how long it would take to get the full picture out of him. And I'd told him to shush, so I'd better set the example of silence myself. Life is full of these awkward little trade-offs.

If she was angry at Fortescue, I told myself, then I hoped she was _very_ angry. Angry enough to just charge right in like a bull in a china shop. Angry enough to make lots of noise. Angry enough to take it for granted Fortescue was hiding under a bed somewhere instead of trying to set an ambush. Come to think of it, I wasn't sure how much of a look she had gotten at me before firing that bio-electric blast. Did she realize we were handcuffed together, or would she expect us to scatter and go our separate ways?

**Krash!**

A pane of glass broke below us, in the basement, well out of sight from where we were. The building was one of those where the ceiling of the basement is actually a foot or more above ground level, leaving room for a few windows around the edges. Dragoness must have kicked one in. As I recalled, they were a bit small for a burglar to find them attractive as ways to sneak in. Dragoness might wriggle through anyway—but I suspected it was only meant to scare us; flush us out if we assumed she was already in the basement and tried to run away from the building.

I chewed on that. If breaking the window was a trick to get us _worried_ about the basement, then Dragoness was thinking things through instead of just flailing around looking for Fortescue with blood in her eye. I didn't like that idea. I wanted her dumb and direct.

It occurred to me that by now, Cap probably would've just stepped outside and faced her one-on-one and kayoed her in about ten seconds. I might have tried the direct approach myself if not for two minor problems that Cap usually didn't have to allow for in his tactics. He _had_ a shield proof against most energy blasts—and I _didn't_. He usually _wasn't_ handcuffed to a prisoner, with no key handy to unlock the cuffs—and I currently _was_. (In retrospect, maybe I should have taken an extra minute to search that cop downstairs for a spare handcuff key after I hog-tied Wrangler? It didn't seem so important at the time; I'd thought the fighting was all over!)

On the bright side . . . if Dragoness really came flying up the stairs, she'd see and shoot Fortescue first. Hopefully, she wouldn't kill him—and I'd have an extra second or two to react while he drew her fire. If I'd really _believed_ she was coming up from the basement, I would have had to grit my teeth and place myself downhill of him so I could shield him even though he didn't deserve it—but I could only be in one place in the stairwell at a time. Staying by the stairwell doorway on the ground floor still felt like the smartest way to go. 

Footsteps! Then someone crossed my field of vision and my right hand twitched before I caught myself short of striking through the doorway into the hall. It was a woman, but she wasn't wearing Dragoness's costume and the brown hair was shorter. There was a thump as she landed several feet away—I think Dragoness must've knocked her out with a bio-electric sting and then carried her into the building and threw her past the doorway to see if anything nasty happened.

_Oh, very good, Tamara. You _almost_ got me to lunge forward through the doorway and expose myself to a flank attack while clubbing an innocent victim!_

I was right. A few seconds later Dragoness came down the hallway. She must have decided the stairwell was clear or else her decoy would have been waylaid. I used the nightstick to good effect and took her down fast before she could blast me with her mutant power. The Avengers, the Fantastic Four, S.H.I.E.L.D., and other outfits all have special restraints that can jam various types of superpowers. But I didn't have any. My best bet was to render her unconscious long enough for someone with more resources to show up and take her into custody. 

"Okay, Fortescue, you may talk now. For starters, tell me how many more people are hunting for your scalp!"

"All around the whole wide world, or just right here in this city?" 

"Start with the city."

He opened his eyes very wide and looked innocent and confused. "None that I know of! But I didn't even know Laralie or Tamara were in town! How can I say who else might have come here looking for me?"

"Swell. Let's back up to the whole wide world. How many enemies have you made, Fortescue? Specifically, how many supervillain enemies?"

His freckled face went blank. He _really_ didn't want to tell me. Then he said, "There are over a dozen costumed women who might think they had a grudge against me, what with one thing and another. You know how it is!"

"No, I _didn't_ know, but I think I'm learning 'how it is' the way _you_ do it! From what Wrangler said—you romance them, don't you? Get them to trust you with something valuable? Talk about quick returns on a good investment? Then you fade away with the 'investment' capital?" 

"Only sometimes," he said defensively. "Other times I just see an opportunity to acquire something and I take it without the mark ever knowing who burgled her apartment!"

"You're a real piece of work, Fortescue. Do you specialize in villainesses?" 

He nodded.

"Why? More challenge? More excitement in flirting with women who wear fancy costumes and have made names for themselves in the media?"

"More money," he said succinctly. I looked at him until he elaborated. "Women who can rob banks and get away with it have more loot to throw around than women who just work as secretaries or nurses. But they aren't surrounded by suspicious relatives and financial advisors and security guards, like really rich women would be. Less interference to worry about. And they're a lot less likely to go running to the police! How do you report the theft of bags of cash you weren't supposed to have in the first place? I figure as long as I can get out of Dodge in a hurry after I make a big score, I'm home free! Safer, in the long run, than swindling law-abiding women who might swallow their pride and tell the FBI how I fooled them! Besides," he added virtuously, "You wouldn't want me to drain an _honest_ working girl's savings, would you?"

"I wouldn't want you to swindle anybody in the first place," I said indignantly. "Unfortunately, I don't want to just wash my hands of all this and let someone murder you for what you did to them, either." (It was getting to be a near thing, though. The man was a parasite in human form; he didn't provide any real services to keep a small part of our society running smoothly; he just lied his face off to feed from the labors of others. And I only had _his word_ for it that he restricted himself to victimizing female _criminals_ who had already stolen the money themselves. And what is a con man's word really worth?) 

"So," he interrupted my train of thought, "Do we just waltz outside again and hope we make it further than two steps beyond the door this time around?"

Good question. I wished I had better intel about the opposition, if there was any opposition left! Wrangler had somehow tracked him to this building right after the cop did (I still needed to call an ambulance for the poor guy, when I could). Dragoness had said that she'd agreed to let Wrangler have first dibs on catching him—but when he made it out of the building, he was fair game for her. Could there be someone else involved who'd agreed to let Wrangler, and then Dragoness, go ahead of her? A whole coalition of Fortescue's furious victims? Sounded like a movie. What did they do; draw straws and compare the lengths?

That cop in the basement. His radio patrol car (RPC) was parked about a hundred feet away from the front entrance to the apartment building; I had seen it as I approached. My original plan had been to escort Fortescue to the car, call in to the local dispatcher and report, then wait for other cops to show up to take Fortescue into custody and succor their drugged friend. Dragoness had interrupted that. Now I had to ask myself what our chances were of surviving the second attempt to reach the RPC. Perhaps I was jumping at shadows, but if he had also managed to offend Titania or the Enchantress then I could find myself _way_ out of my league! (I wondered if I should ask for a complete list of his victims and then decided I wouldn't believe him anyway. Men like him love to brag about how irresistably charming they are to a wide range of women.) 

What would Cap do? He would either find a way to call for help or else he would find a way to get himself out of the building without dying in the process.

The building was condemned; the chances of finding a working phone in it were meager. I started wondering if I ought to make it a point to carry a cell phone all the time. It would make an unsightly bulge in my costume, but that wouldn't kill me. Lack of telecommunications, on the other hand, just might!

That left finding an exit strategy. If someone else might be watching the doors—then it hit me. Of course! "Fortescue," I said sharply, "Help me get this flying harness off her back!"

How hard could it be to operate the jetpack and wings? After we had them detached, Fortescue and I would go up the roof, I'd put them on, and we'd soar away into the wild blue yonder! Sooner or later we'd find a park or something where there was enough flat empty space for me to figure out how to land safely, and then I'd make contact with the cops and give Fortescue to them! Anyone still waiting outside, down at street level, to see if we overcame Dragoness and made it out the door again, would be left flat-footed!

What could go wrong?


	3. Chapter 3: Airborne

**Chapter Three: Airborne**

A friendly word of advice—if you ever happen to decide it would be smart tactics to use a confiscated jetpack and pair of metal wings to make your maiden flight through New York City airspace in order to escape enemies of unknown numbers and resources . . . you might want to reconsider. I speak from personal experience. Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time!

Of course, there was _no way_ I was going to let Fortescue wear the pack and the wings and direct our flight. That meant they had to be strapped on to my body. But given that we were still handcuffed together, we were going to have to cling to each other unless I just wanted about a hundred and seventy pounds of him dangling from my left wrist in mid-air.

We talked about it for a bit. What we came up with was that he would stand in front of me, his back turned toward me, with my arms around his waist, holding him tight. I was sure I could handle the strain for the few minutes it would take to get us far away from this condemned building's roof. "Don't get any funny ideas," I warned him. "If I _ever_ hear that you've been bragging I insisted on wrapping my arms around you when we were alone together . . . then what happens next won't be pretty!"

"Message received!" Fortescue said sweetly. "You want us to both keep it a deep, dark _secret_! Well, sure! I'll do anything to preserve a nice girl's reputation!" He flashed a boyish grin at me.

Coming from a young man I actually liked—or at least respected—that phony attempt at flirtation might actually have been funny. Not that I have much practice with flirting (read: no practice at all _before_ the process that transformed me into the much more capable girl that I now was). But coming from what I knew to be a cold-blooded con man, it just made me feel a bit nauseous.

I wasn't sure how to respond under the circumstances, so I ignored his remark entirely. "So help buckle me up already!" He took a hint and shut up for a moment while he made sure the jetpack and wings were strapped on to me the same way Dragoness had been wearing them. I trusted him to do it properly because once we fired up the jetpack and took off, his neck was just as likely to get broken as mine if anything went badly wrong.

When the time came for liftoff though, he didn't seem so sure of himself. "Are you sure this thing is rated for carrying two people at once?"

"No," I said cheerfully. "I've never seen any specs for it, and neither have you! But as fast as Dragoness could fly with it, I'm sure the jetpack is powerful enough to at least slow our fall considerably, even if it can't _keep us_ at high altitude!"

"Thanks, that makes me feel so much better."

Give him credit, though. He didn't try to back out. He understood my logic, as I'd explained it to him, about leapfrogging right over any more enemies who might have the building staked out at ground level.

So we took off. We'd carefully established which thingamajig was the throttle before we tried to go up, up, and away. Using the wings to steer was a lot simpler than it looked; the controls were configured to respond to shoulder movements without requiring the use of the pilot's hands. For the first time in my life, I really understood why birds enjoy themselves so much!

Of course, they don't usually have unwanted passengers . . .

We had been in New Jersey when we took off. I headed across the Hudson River, getting my bearings and trying to figure out where I was going to experiment with my first landing. That long green rectangle must be Central Park. That meant Avengers Mansion was about—

Suddenly I heard someone yelling, "Yo! Blondie! Pull over! You're carrying something I want!" I twisted my head to see who it was.

The yeller was a girl in a green bodysuit with bits of purple here and there, and some fancy helmet that had all sorts of cables and stuff hooked up to it. That wasn't the part that bothered me. The fact that she was flying in from the right to intercept us, and she was moving darn fast, was what made me nervous. She wasn't any costumed hero I'd ever seen pictures of.

"Ouch," Fortescue said softly. "It's Andrea!"

"Oh, don't tell me."

"Okay, gorgeous, I won't tell you I extracted several thousand dollars from her last year!"

Andrea was about twenty feet away, off our starboard wing, at the moment. I whispered, "What does she do?"

"Magnetism, mostly," he muttered helpfully. "Kinda like Magneto, only not nearly as tough."

"Hello!" I called across the gap between us. "Are you Andrea? I'm Free Spirit!"

"Just call me Lodestone—it seems more professional."

"Lodestone?" I was drawing a total blank. If she had ever fought the Avengers or the X-Men or the FF, I should've heard about it by now . . . I thought. "I'm sorry, ma'am, but I'm pretty new at this sort of thing. I don't recall hearing about you!"

"No biggie," she said tolerantly. "I've only tangled with Darkhawk a couple of times; that's not the best way to build a major rep."

Darkhawk? I wasn't sure who that was either, but decided not to ask. "So, what can I do for you?"

"Just give me that scoundrel you're carrying. Or maybe you want to share the fun with me after we land? Either way, it's all good!"

"I don't think you understand my position. I'm not planning to kill him—although I can understand the urge. He's under arrest."

"Oh?" She soared in a little closer and peered at where my left wrist was chained to his right. "Oh, I see. Therefore the handcuffs? And just where were you taking him?"

"Avengers Mansion, if all else fails. I'm not much of a flier, but I know where that is and it's got plenty of elbow room outside for an amateur landing."

The lower part of her face was not covered by the helmet; I saw her mouth pouting as she thought it over. "That doesn't work for me. Just how attached are you to Abe, here?"

I blinked. "Abe?"

"That would be me," Fortescue said helpfully. "I don't always use the same name when I'm working."

"Whatever!" Lodestone said impatiently. "Look, Blondie, I swear I won't _kill_ him. What if I promise to give him back, still breathing, just twenty-four hours from now."

"Give _how much_ of him back?" I asked suspiciously. "If he's missing both arms and both legs, I'll be a bit peeved."

"Suppose I promise to give back at least nine-tenths of his original body mass? And leave his really vital organs strictly alone? Heck, just a favor, I won't even blind him!"

"What would you say to six hours and ninety-five percent back?"

"You drive a hard bargain! I guess I could go along with that, if you're serious. I'll just choose carefully which five percent to keep as souvenirs! I'll even slide those handcuffs off you without damaging them, as a bonus!"

Tempting offer. Unfortunately, I _wasn't_ serious. I was just stalling for time while I tried to work out a new plan, now that the 'clever' idea of going airborne to get away from Fortescue's enemies had fizzled. She could fly at least as well as this contraption could, and she could use magnetism on its metal parts anytime she felt like it. She was really being very polite, talking to me instead of just knocking me out of the sky in the first five seconds. Oh well, when I decided to wear this red-white-and-blue costume as a regular thing, I didn't seriously expect to die of old age.

I decided our best bet was to be a moving target. Maybe her power had to be "aimed" like a gun, so that if you weren't where you had been a few seconds ago, she might "miss" by a mile? If I could swerve between buildings and block her line of sight most of the time, we might even find a way to survive this experience! (How did the X-Men usually defeat Magneto, anyway?) Until now, we'd been cruising in a straight line in the direction of Avengers Mansion.

Without saying anything to tip Lodestone off, I opened the throttle, swooped low and to the left, trying to get down between two buildings . . . and suddenly our aerodynamics changed as the metal wings shredded themselves. I suppose it was too much to hope that Dragoness would have worn wings made out of nonferrous materials? My desperate plan to outmaneuver Lodestone had lasted about ten seconds. Fortunately, we were already pretty low as we fell the last several feet. I was trying to twist us in midair so we'd land in a dumpster instead of on flat concrete, and Fortescue was screaming, and then—

A fiery circle suddenly appeared in the air just below us and expanded rapidly until it was big enough for both of us to fall through the middle of it without brushing the burning edge. All of a sudden we weren't in the Big Apple any more! I wasn't even sure we were on Planet Earth any more!


	4. Chapter 4: CoConspirators

**Chapter Four: Co-Conspirators **

As we passed through the flaming circle in mid-air, suddenly there was pink sky all around us and we were still falling—

_Ker-Splash!_

Okay, so unexpectedly ending our long fall by splashing down in water was a lot better than getting flattened against solid matter, but it still left something to be desired. Did you ever go off a diving board and do a classic belly-flop in the pool? I'd done it a few times, back when I was just another nerdy, slightly uncoordinated girl taking swimming lessons one summer. This time it was my back that slammed into the water's surface, thanks to the way Fortescue had been flailing about while I was trying to roll us over on our left sides . . . _ouch!_ It wasn't a sensation I'd ever wanted to revisit. And I wouldn't have done it now if I hadn't had a man chained to my wrist and if I'd had a little more time to realize I would fall into water instead of a dumpster. If someone was going to give us a miraculous rescue, I wish they'd tipped us off a few seconds sooner . . .

At any rate, I just knew that a fair amount of the skin on my back was going to be a painful red by the time I got home and was ready to take a shower and change my clothes. (Of course, there was no telling when that would happen, the way things were going . . .)

The next bit was loud and confusing. Fortescue and I both knew how to swim, but neither of us had ever practiced in handcuffs. Initially we tried to go in different directions at the same time . . . which didn't work. I'll skip the things we yelled at each other before we agreed on a bearing. Once we got that straightened out, it took about thirty seconds to make it to shore. We were soaking wet, of course, but it was a warm day and I figured our clothes would dry out pretty quick without putting our health at risk. I told Fortescue to help free me from the remains of Dragoness's jetpack; Lodestone had done something to make the engine stop working before we fell through whatever-it-was we had just fallen through. Now it was just fifty pounds or so of dead weight on my back.

After we discarded it, we moved to the top of a small rise several paces away from the shore and studied our surroundings. I looked up. The sky still looked very pink, as far as the eye could see. At first I'd wondered if we might be near sunset, with red light bouncing off the underside of a solid cloud layer . . . but no. There were fluffy white clouds here and there, dotted against the pink background, and by seeing which parts of them were the brightest white, I deduced the local sun was over . . . there, behind me and to the right and still well above the horizon. I twisted my head around and found myself looking at something that might be a blue sun—at the same moment that Fortescue yelped: "Free Spirit! Is that a flying island coming our way?"

I looked to the left, where he was pointing. It was big, whatever it was. "Flying island" was a fair description. Conical, flat top (near as we could tell from our lower position), with a huge mass of dirt dangling from the underside and tapering down to a point, and yes, it _was_ drifting in our general direction. First approximation: the top of it might be roughly one mile in diameter; the cone might be two miles high; the bottom tip might be about two-thirds of a mile above the surface of the planet (if we were actually on a planet?); the whole thing might be nine miles away from us.

Fortescue muttered, "Wouldn't it be great if it got directly over us and then suddenly decided to respect the law of gravity?"

"Do not fash yourselves on that account!" said a woman's voice, rather sultry, I thought. "On Liveworld, the natural laws are whatever the Dreamqueen wishes them to be, no more and no less!"

_On where?_

Fortescue and I were getting the hang of this handcuffed-together thing. We managed to rotate smoothly around the "center" (our linked wrists) till we both faced the speaker.

Pale skin and long blond hair, and she was wearing an outfit I had seen several times in photos. The low-cut tight green top, the fancy green tiara, the black tights with lines of pale green rings running down each leg . . . the traditional garb of Amora the Enchantress, one of the Mighty Thor's fellow Asgardians. One of the _nastier_ Asgardians—she'd been a member of the first incarnation of the Masters of Evil, the ones who fought the Avengers when they were barely getting started!

I remembered the outfit better than the facial features, though—it was always possible this was _some other_ blond woman dressed up like the Enchantress as a prank. Some nicer woman who wouldn't hurt a fly and only wanted to be a Good Samaritan to us—

"Hello, Amora!" Fortescue said cheerily. "Were you the one who pulled our fat out of the fire?"

_So much for _that_ forlorn hope._

"Aye," the Enchantress said. "'Twas one of mine own mystic portals that carried you pair 'cross time and space to this strange realm, the home of my new ally." She gave me a piercing look. "Greetings, Warrior-Maiden. I see you wear raiment strikingly similar to that of Thor Odinson's most stalwart ally amongst his Avenger friends, the noble Captain America. Would it be in the nature of a familial coat of arms? Is the brave Captain your kinsman?"

"No blood ties—just a fellow countryman," I assured her. "We both took our national flag as our inspiration in costuming. But you could call me his 'apprentice'—he has been training me in his spare time."

"Forsooth, that sounds like the Captain I have met and admired before—ever a slave to his perceived duty, so that even his 'idle' hours must largely be spent pursuing that duty by other means—such as overseeing the efforts of a rising generation of champions, rather than devoting his evenings to the more traditional masculine pastimes of wine, women, and song, after a hard day of trouncing ruffians."

"You really do know him!" I said agreeably. "Is that why you saved us from that nasty fall? As a favor to a valiant adversary in case I was his favorite niece or something?"

"Nay," she said regretfully. "I was monitoring the activities of young Fortescue, your companion of the moment, and did not care to see him perish before he has fulfilled his obligations to us."

I blinked and asked, "'To us'?" (She didn't seem to be using the royal we.)

"Myself and my new ally, the Dreamqueen, mistress of all of Liveworld."

I suppose my face showed I was still drawing a blank on that one. The Enchantress smiled a not-very-nice smile and said, "I go now to acquaint her with your arrival. I suspect we shall return anon, and then you may gauge her quality for yourself!" She waved her hand and another glowing circle sprang up around her—and then she was gone!

I turned on Fortescue. "Tell me about this 'obligation' you have to her. What did she do, catch you with your hand in the cookie jar and make you promise to do her some favors as a ransom for your life? Tell me you _weren't_ that stupid. The Enchantress gives _Thor_ headaches, when she isn't acting as part of a team raking the entire Avengers over the coals, and you and I are not as tough as a God of Thunder! Tell me you didn't target the Enchantress as a victim and have it backfire!"

"Er, actually, Free Spirit, what happened was—" He broke off as I touched the tip of his nose with the nightstick I'd just pulled loose from my belt.

"That wasn't a 'yes' or a 'no,' Fortescue. All I want from you right now is a nice simple 'yes' or 'no.' Did you or did you not try to rob or cheat the Enchantress somehow?"

"No!" he said hastily. "Never did! Nor her friend the Dreamqueen!"

I relaxed and started to withdraw the nightstick from his face, and then he added, "I agreed to go sweet-talk one of their potential rivals, instead!"

I don't get migraines. But at moments such as this, I understand why some women do—and why other women are sometimes tempted to pretend they do, as an excuse to retreat into their bedrooms for a few minutes while they try to cope with sudden stress. I counted one-to-ten in German, silently, before asking him: "And how did that work out?"

"Nothing to tell! I never actually caught up with her to give it the old college try!"

That made me feel a little better. Somewhere out there was a powerful villainess who _wasn't_ actually hunting Fortescue's scalp . . . yet, because he'd never done anything to her. "Tell me about the Dreamqueen. What does she do?"

"I've never met her. I hear she tangled with Alpha Flight a couple of times, when she was trying to invade our world. Apparently she's just about omnipotent when it comes to reshaping things right here on Liveworld, but she was getting awfully bored and wanted to try something new. I gather one thing she _can't_ do is open a portal from this world to another . . . and that's something Amora can do with a snap of her fingers! Somehow they made contact and decided they had common interests, and could combine their various resources to do things neither lady could ever do single-handed."

"A fair summary of the situation," said a woman's voice from behind me. (I was getting _sick and tired_ of having people sneak up behind me today!) "I have learned to my sorrow that I cannot do everything all by myself, outside the bounds of my own demesne."

Fortescue and I turned and looked. This had to be the Dreamqueen. A tall woman. A wild mass of green hair rising well above her skull, stray locks sticking out in all directions, framed by an elaborate red tiara that included two things that looked like long goat horns sticking up. I studied her face so I'd remember it, then I paid more attention to her outfit below the neck.

At first I thought she was wearing a red bodysuit that had a narrow white slash stitched on the front, so that it ran down the center of her torso to the waist. Then I looked back at her face (bone-white) and her hands (ditto) and realized she actually was wearing a red bodysuit that left a long strip of very pallid skin absolutely bare. A dark red cape billowed behind her in a wind that hadn't been there a moment earlier—somehow I just knew the Dreamqueen had created it for the occasion!

"So this is Fortescue," she said, grinning at him in a way that somehow suggested a lioness licking her chops. "And who is his little friend?" she inquired of the Enchantress, who was standing a few feet to her left.

"She calls herself 'Free Spirit,'" the Enchantress said. "An apprentice of Captain America of the Avengers."

"Ah, yes. You've mentioned them, Amora. The USA's answer to Canada's Alpha Flight program?"

I blinked. She had her chronology a bit mixed—the Avengers had been around for years and years before anyone ever heard of Alpha Flight—but somehow I didn't feel it was worth arguing about, under the circumstances.

Fortescue may have been thinking the same; he said agreeably, "Yes, they were meant to serve much the same function. Speaking of functions—naturally I still intend to do that mission the two of you wanted, but I find myself a bit handicapped by my current circumstances." He held up his right wrist (still handcuffed to my left one) to illustrate the point.

"You never should have been so clumsy as to be apprehended by that law officer in the first place," the Enchantress said with a profound lack of sympathy in her tone.

"But I'm just a foolish mortal with a few talents," Fortescue said in a wheedling tone. "I can put them to much better use in your service, Lady Amora, if you will just give me a little help. Your Asgardian strength must be a hundred times that of any ordinary woman from Midgard, yes? It would be so simple for you to just tear these handcuffs apart as if they were paper! And I'd be ever so grateful—"

"Cur! Am I thy handmaiden, to do thy bidding in such small matters? That little bit of steel does not prevent you from walking or talking, does it? In fact, methinks it might actually be turned to our advantage if you continue to wear that a while longer as I send you to where your quarry was most recently sighted!"

(It seemed to me that Amora _could_ have torn open our cuffs in significantly less time than it took her to say that she _wouldn't_, but perhaps I just don't understand the protocol of Asgardian goddesses?)

Nothing daunted, Fortescue bowed to the Dreamqueen. "Your Majesty . . . I understand your power here is well nigh unlimited. If you could deign to—"

She laughed a quick, brusque laugh. "Amora hired you, mortal. I feel it's _her_ prerogative to decide how to treat you. If my ally does not feel her vassal needs those handcuffs removed immediately, why should I interfere?"

The Enchantress said, "I originally employed you, Fortescue, because I knew the quarry would be most alert to any use of psychic or mystic power to influence her decisions. Fortunately, you have no such advantages, but only a sort of roguish natural charm that would not raise any alarms. It occurs to me that being chained to another mortal further emphasizes your relative helplessness in any physical confrontation, and your lack of what mortals call 'superpowers.' Once the two of you have done what is required, I shall certainly be willing to liberate you from those shackles at the same time I pay the promised reward—"

"Now wait a minute!" I said indignantly. "The two of us? Fortescue may have promised to do some work for you, Enchantress, but I never did! What makes you think I'll just meekly go along with whatever power games you're playing with some other woman?"

"Oh," the Dreamqueen said in a sickly-sweet voice, "I think we can find ways to persuade you . . ."


	5. Chapter 5: Bargaining

**Chapter Five: Bargaining**

"Persuade me?" I parroted. "You can certainly _kill_ me. You can probably drop that floating island on me with a snap of your fingers. And your buddy there is an Asgardian; I'm sure she can cripple me with her bare hands if all else fails. But all that is different from getting me to cooperate when I'm still alive and in my right mind!"

The Enchantress made a moue at the messy image I'd evoked. I remembered her Avengers dossier said she hated the hand-to-hand stuff, although (like any Asgardian) she was strong enough to pick up an armored car and stroll off with it. But she probably considered it unladylike to get her hands dirty (or would that be "ungoddesslike"?). She said, "True enough—your corpse would be entirely useless to us. Let us ponder it further. What motivates mortals to do the most difficult and unlikely things? Fear, greed, love, ambition, rage, duty . . ."

"So let's run down the list and see what happens!" the Dreamqueen exclaimed.

The world twisted around me. A wolf at least ten feet tall was crouched a little ways off, preparing to spring, and its jaws were slavering and its yellow eyes were burning and it obviously wanted a red-blooded American girl for a light appetizer, _and my foot was caught in the steel jaws of a trap so that I couldn't avoid its leap—_

Then a king cobra was rearing up above me, its hood spread, its tongue flickering; it started to strike, _and I was trapped in a narrow alley with no room to dodge to one side or the other before the fangs got me—_

Fires were leaping up around me and I could feel the heat on my face, so hot I thought I must be blistering even before the dancing flames could ever touch my skin, _and I couldn't move away because I was tied to a tree—_

Then the world around me was back to normal—at least, if we define "normal" as "solid pink sky and blue sun and huge flying islands and probably only four sentient beings on the entire planet"—but you get the idea. My heart was pounding at least twice as fast as normal, but there were no giant beasts; no flames or blisters; no traps around me except for the handcuffs linking me to Fortescue. The Dreamqueen stood before me, asking, "How would you like to dream those things, in endless repetitions and variations, every night for the rest of your miserable little life?"

"I'd hate it," I said frankly. "But I'd also hate to knuckle under to bullying, so I guess I'll just have to take my chances!"

"Dreamqueen," Amora chided, "you didn't let me finish. Many mortals can be enslaved by large doses of fear, but no apprentice of Captain America's is likely to succumb so easily."

"Greed, then?" The Dreamqueen threw back her head and laughed. Suddenly the ground a few feet ahead of Fortescue and myself was covered with a layer of gold bars, in a grid twenty-by-ten, and as the Dreamqueen kept laughing, there was a second layer, a third, a fourth . . . until finally the tower of gold bars was high as my chin!

I tried to estimate how many millions of dollars' worth of bullion I was looking at, and then gave up. I could reach out and touch it—and Fortescue did just that while I watched. It was positively sickening, the way he stroked some of those bars and looked as if he were about to start drooling.

"You humans prize this element, yes?" the Dreamqueen sneered. "I can produce any amount you could possibly need to coddle yourself for the rest of your mortal lifetime. Then Amora can transport it to your private treasury on Earth in the blink of an eye! Is that enough incentive for you, little mortal?"

A girl has her pride. I felt my mouth twisting into a scowl. "Keep it for yourself—I'll just have to get by without!"

(It may have helped that the pile was so big I just couldn't take it seriously.)

The Dreamqueen stared at me. "I offer you a lifetime of luxury, and this is the thanks I get? What's wrong with you, child?"

I swear the Enchantress rolled her eyes as she said in a voice of mock patience, "That was not quite what I meant either, when I mentioned fear and greed on a _general_ list of some of the passions that inflame mortals to take extreme action . . . there is no need to run through the entire list with this maiden. I already _know_ which lever should be used to budge her!"

"Fine! Go ahead and show me how it's done, if you're so smart!"

"Thank you," the Enchantress said graciously. "I believe I shall." She turned her head to make eye contact with me. "Free Spirit, I feel strongly that the Norns have brought your thread into this tapestry for a reason, and I have learned aforetime that it is best to humor them in such matters—instead of wasting much effort trying to rip an exotic thread out again as if it had never intruded in the grand design. As a goddess of Asgard, I swear unto you that I shall not injure you if we fail to reach an accommodation here and now; rather, I shall entreat my puissant ally to find some small island in her demesne where you may eat and drink and live unmolested until our present joint venture into certain affairs of Midgard be successfully (or otherwise) completed—after which I shall send you safely home as easily as I brought you here!"

She paused; possibly waiting for a reaction. I didn't say anything; I was searching my memory of the summaries of her past misdeeds as provided in her Avengers dossier. Like most villains, the Enchantress would break other people's laws in a heartbeat if it suited her agenda, but was she nonetheless a woman of her word? Were there supernatural penalties that _automatically_ befell any Asgardian who spoke and then broke a personal oath? I just wasn't sure! Thor would have known, but Thor wasn't here! Other longtime Avengers might know something about it, but they weren't here either! Somehow, asking the Enchantress to send me back to Avengers Mansion just long enough to let me ask people about her integrity (or lack thereof) didn't feel like a good idea.

Perhaps some of that showed on my face. Perhaps the Enchantress could somehow scent my doubts at a psychic level. Perhaps she simply was wise enough to realize that waiting for me to say _Of course I'm happy to take your word for it that you'll do me no harm_ would mean a very long wait indeed. At any rate, she pressed forward after a few seconds with me as her captive audience. "Yet I conjecture that you would rather _not_ spend the next few days or weeks in exile. Of course you have no reason to love and obey my ally or myself. But we might find common cause against someone who is a more immediate threat to all you hold dear in your homeland than anyone who stands before you here and now, yes?"

Ah ha. _Duty._ She was trying to invoke my sense of duty to make me agree to something. This could be interesting. "Hypothetically, we might have an enemy in common," I agreed politely. "If so, who is she? How do I know I need to care about her so much?"

"I do not wish to tell you the name just now, for I fear you have an honest face that would likely reveal your _lack_ of surprise if, a short time hence, you suddenly came face-to-face with the woman who worries me. Better by far if your sudden introduction to her places no great strain upon your acting abilities."

She paused again, apparently contemplating how much to tell me. I was still trying to work out whether that crack about my honest face was a compliment or an insult, from her point of view, when the Enchantress resumed by asking: "How long has the Captain been training you?"

"Several months."

"And I imagine he has shown you many pictures and histories of the 'worst offenders' whom the Avengers have faced, or heard of from other costumed champions and such, over the years?"

"Sure!"

"Then I think it near certain that he has already acquainted you with _this woman's_ malevolent history. What would you say to a wager?"

"I would probably say no. Gambling is a vice."

"If it leads to throwing away the last of your money in the desperate hope of recouping past losses by a miraculous turn of fortune, yes. But what need have I of your money? Suppose we arrange a different sort of wager. Upon your honor, you swear to accompany Fortescue until he finds the woman I wish him to approach. When you see her face and hear her name, I think you will recognize her. If not, you may then do as you see fit—hand him over to the police, warn her of our plottings against her, whatever strikes you as honorable. But I will only send you back to Midgard now, to put this wager into effect, if you promise me that if you do recognize her and remember her reputation, then you will consider the situation carefully _before_ judging where your duty lies. My wager is that you will decide your duty includes frustrating her ambitions. If you choose to help Fortescue inveigle his way into her confidence, then I win!"

"And if you lose your wager? If I think she's very small potatoes, or I don't even know her?"

"Then you win—and are free to do as you please."

I raised my eyebrows. "'Free.' With Fortescue still cuffed to me and probably screaming for this woman you mention—or someone else on the wrong side of the law—to come rescue him from me?"

"Ah. Dreamqueen, I beseech a small boon."

"Let me hear it." The Dreamqueen had been looking rather sulky as my negotiations with her partner progressed. Twice she had seemed likely to interrupt, but each time I rather thought she had remembered that she herself had _challenged_ the Enchantress to prove that she could do better, and she would look very petty if she tried to derail her partner's efforts to prove she could!

"Can your power shape a replica of the key that will open these shackles?"

The Dreamqueen looked at me, looked at Fortescue, looked at the cuffs . . . and snapped her fingers. Something glittered into existence in mid-air just in front of Amora's eyes. The Enchantress caught it deftly before it could fall to the grass, and said, "If we can agree upon terms of a wager, I shall give you this before sending the pair of you back to Midgard . . . provided the terms include your promise not to use it before you have met the quarry. Saving only the unambiguous need to save a life," she added generously, beating me to that point by a hair as I opened my mouth to mention that possibility.

This was ridiculous. For the last hour or two, I'd desperately wanted to get these handcuffs off. Now I would only get a key if I promised _not_ to use it immediately? I chewed on it, thinking about her terms and trying to imagine various worst-case scenarios I might stumble into if I didn't bargain carefully. Meanwhile, the Dreamqueen looked appalled. She demanded of her partner, "What is this, Amora? Do you truly mean to simply take this mortal snip's word for what she will do after she is out from under our thumbs?"

What had Fortescue said? That she'd lived here alone most of her life, all-powerful, but increasingly bored? It occurred to me that being alone and omnipotent in your own little world was a great recipe for never developing any serious social skills. No one to talk to; no feeling of any need to learn how to compromise with any occasional visitors. Amora, part of a large community of supernaturally empowered "gods" and "goddesses," must have had a lot more incentive to learn how to compromise and negotiate in tricky situations where she couldn't just cast a spell to get whatever she wanted.

Amora said calmly, "Her mentor's oath on _anything_ would mean that he would do exactly what he promised, to the best of his ability—or die in the attempt. I only ask her promise that she will meet a certain woman and then consider carefully the demands of her own duty. If nothing comes of it, what have we really lost? A powerless mortal such as she is no direct threat to either of _us_, yes? Yet any value we may obtain from her activities will be pure profit!"

There was nothing to be gained by taking umbrage at her disparaging description of me, so I tried to move the conversation forward.

"Let me recap," I said. "You return me to Earth after I promise not to turn against Fortescue, nor reveal your plans to anyone, _before_ I meet your 'quarry.' Once I meet her, if I recognize her then my promise binds me for at least another minute or so while I try to figure out if I really want to help him fool her. If I decide the answer is no, my promise expires and I'm free to do as I please? Which includes using the handcuff key?"

"That is the gist of my wager."

"I need at least one extra condition in there."

"Speak."

"A time limit! I'm not making an _open-ended_ promise that could mean I had to spend the next year of my life chained to Fortescue while he raced around from one place to another, _constantly_ telling me we'd catch up with your quarry any minute now! How close to her can you put us with one of your portals? If we set an upper limit of, say, another hour before I'm released from my promise regardless, then I think we can do business!"

We haggled for several more minutes. I'll summarize the highlights.

The Enchantress thought she knew where her quarry was, but still wanted ten hours—just to be on the safe side. Since she seemed to think it important to have my willing participation, I yielded very little and finally got her down to three. She would put us down within a mile of wherever she thought her quarry was now. We'd move in and meet the woman. Then I'd make up my mind. But if it took more than three hours to find her, I was home free. (And the Enchantress and the Dreamqueen would be perfectly free to find some other flunky to approach the quarry later. Since I still didn't know the quarry's name, I couldn't very well warn her if Fortescue and I never caught up with her today, could I? But this part went discreetly unsaid.)

Fortescue wanted an escape clause in there saying that if the three hours ran out, he got turned loose by me with no hard feelings. Or at least a nice long head start (twelve hours, say) before I went looking for him or put out any All-Points Bulletins on him, hard feelings or not. He didn't get his wish; he had no leverage. The Enchantress was the only person in Liveworld who could zap me back to Earth; that gave her considerable leverage!

We finally worked out terms that left me convinced I wouldn't be required to do anything directly contrary to my conscience—such as being an accessory to murder—so I promised to live by the terms of the Enchantress's proposed "wager" so long as she, the Dreamqueen, and Fortescue made no effort to harm me or otherwise double-cross me. I still didn't understand why I couldn't just promise to tag along with Fortescue for a bit without needing any handcuffs, but the Enchantress seemed to be getting all mystical on the subject instead of offering any "logical" rationale.

"I regard those manacles as part of the thread it amused the Norns to dangle before my eyes," she said solemnly after I raised the point again. "I feel certain that whatever you must do, can be done by working around that minor impediment."

"And just how do we explain away the fact that we're handcuffed together as we walk down a busy street? Inquiring minds will want to know!"

"Fortescue's a clever lad," the Enchantress said with an engaging smile. "Surely he'll think of something!"

She whispered some last instructions in his ear and then stepped back and made an elaborate gesture—and suddenly the con man and I were standing in an alley in Manhattan.


	6. Chapter 6: Contact

**Author's Note: **Just a quick reminder—this story is set in the early days of Free Spirit's career, roughly around the time of the comic books Marvel was publishing in 1995 or early 1996. So don't expect any references to "Civil War" or any of the other "Big Events" of the past 11 or 12 years.

* * *

**Chapter Six: Contact  
**

"Why the handcuffs?" the bouncer asked.

"My girlfriend is very possessive," Fortescue said smugly. "Doesn't like to let me run loose in public."

The big red-bearded man in the muscle shirt looked us over carefully before saying to me, "Seems like wasted effort, honey—if you were mine, I wouldn't be dumb enough to run away from you. And even if I did, I'm sure you could find something better. But if you're both happy this way . . . " He shrugged. "Okay, walk right in. Just don't try to slap more of those cuffs on anyone who doesn't want them, or somebody might mistake you for a pair of cops!" He chuckled at the silly notion as we squeezed past him, through the outer door and down the staircase to the nightclub called the Nonconformist.

In the twenty-block walk on the street, my red-white-and-blue costume had gotten a few stares. But down here I probably looked downright dowdy. Men and women alike were wearing any combination of styles and colors, covering any percentage of their skins that they happened to feel like covering.

I saw one woman wearing black jeans and an X-Files T-shirt . . . topped off by a dark hat and thick veil that made her look (from the neck up, anyway) like a grieving widow in the Victorian Age. She was dancing with a man dressed like one of the Keystone Cops in those old comedies my dad has on video. I could go on, but you get the idea.

I've spent enough time around Avengers Mansion that I'm used to weirdness in people's apparel—but not so much of it crowded together all at once! Even so, the visual spectacle was trivial compared to the sheer noise all these people were making. And of course the music was being played louder so that you could at least hear the driving beat over all the hubbub.

On the plus side, eavesdropping on someone else's conversation was virtually impossible. I leaned over and said into Fortescue's right ear, "So—do you know where we're going?"

He made a gesture and I turned my head so he could speak into my ear. "Course I do! We ask a bartender to point us toward Big Abby, and then she can guide us the rest of the way!"

"Big Abby?" I asked, but Fortescue was already tugging me along toward the bar over on the left side of the room.

I followed him as he made way through the crowd. It took awhile. As I squeezed past a white man with long black dreadlocks, he asked, "Hey, babe, why the handcuffs?"

"Sorority hazing!" I said perkily. "I'm lucky there's only one hour left on the clock!"

Fortescue waited until we were out of earshot from that man (i.e., about two steps later) before saying, "Good one! I don't think I've ever used the 'hazing' excuse when caught in an awkward situation—I'll have to make a note!"

I was about to point out he'd have to remember to say "fraternity" instead of "sorority"—but just then a swarthy man pinched my butt and I turned around long enough to do something reasonably painful but not permanently disabling to his hand. I'm not sure if anyone else in that crowded room even noticed his yelp before he remembered his dignity and slunk away pretending nothing had happened. We finally made it all the way through the mob to some empty stools at the bar without any real fuss.

The bartender closest to us was a black man, a bit chubby, somewhere in his twenties by my estimate. He wore a blood-red vest over a white Oxford shirt. "Evening, folks! What'll it be?'

Fortescue said as he slid onto a stool, "Just a mug of beer for me—pick the brand yourself! What about you, Sis?"

I let the "Sis" part slide as I ordered a soft drink and perched on another stool.

The bartender moved about a bit, getting our drinks and placing them gently in front of us, before casually asking, "Why the handcuffs?"

"My sister is rehearsing for a play," Fortescue explained. "Plucky superhero fighting street crime. Method acting, don't you know. I agreed to help her practice the technique of moving around while handcuffed." He took a draft of his beer.

The bartender studied me thoughtfully. "Stanislavski Method? So right now you're thinking of yourself as what, Captainette America?"

I gave him a friendly grin. "Fair guess—but the name is 'Free Spirit.'"

He cocked his head a bit as he thought that over. "_Free_ Spirit—and dressed like a flag—but you spend a lot of your stage time handcuffed to somebody else? Oh, I get it. Your playwright must be dabbling in postmodernism, right? Making you a walking, talking, ironic metaphor?"

"That's my whole life, lately," I said agreeably, and sipped at my soda.

Fortescue evidently felt we'd made enough small talk now. "Sis just tagged along on my errands today—I'm looking for a lady called Big Abby who can introduce me to someone else my employer wants to contact. I heard Big Abby's usually in around this time."

The bartender surveyed the rest of the club while saying, "Haven't seen her yet—but you're actually a bit early for her. I'd be surprised if she didn't turn up, sometime in the next twenty, thirty minutes."

Fortescue nodded. "Thanks! We'll keep our eyes peeled!" He paused; then asked, "By the way, what does she look like? All I really know is the name—so I figure she's a hefty woman."

"You could say that," the bartender said politely. "She's not skinny. Blond hair, shoulder-length . . . and as for the rest, I'm pretty sure you'll spot her when she comes in. She actually looks like the sort of person you'd probably spend your time fighting, 'Free Spirit,'" he added to me before moving off to take care of a new arrival a few stools down to our left.

We sat there and nursed our drinks for awhile. Fortescue made small talk for a couple of minutes about the imaginary play I'd be performing in, and I did my best to respond as if we both knew what we were talking about. After the conversation faded away, I had plenty of time to try to remember any villainesses with first names of Abby, Abigail, or anything else starting AB-. Nothing sprang to mind. What if the nickname derived from the surname? Abernathy? Abbott? Abbruzzese? Still no bells ringing . . . I reminded myself not to be too judgmental. Just because the bartender thought Big Abby _looked like_ a supervillain didn't mean she _was_ one!

(One of these days I will get my optimism under control.)

About fifteen minutes after I'd taken my first sip, "Big Abby" walked into the room. That was my snap assumption, anyway. I nudged Fortescue and pointed with my chin.

She was ugly. I _never_ say that about anyone to their face, because my mom would be extremely disappointed in me, but in these personal memoirs I'll just record the truth. I suppose it's possible that there's someone out there who would say that blunt features covered with thick green scaly hide are attractive, but not to my eyes. She was well over six feet tall, with what looked like hundreds of pounds of muscle beneath those scales, and she wore a flowered blouse and blue skirt, which left her lower legs and feet bare so that I could see she only had two toes on each huge foot. She came through the crowd the way a shark comes through a cloud of plankton. I noticed nobody tried to pinch _her_ butt. The bartender had been right about the blond hair. He obviously knew her tastes; he had a stein of lager fresh from the tap by the time she leaned on the bar and reached for it.

"Howdy, George," she greeted our bartender. "What's cookin'?"

"Couple of folks hoping to meet your employer," he said casually. "Nothing else, but it's still early evening, right?"

"Sure." She followed his gaze to Fortescue. "You wanna talk with my boss? Tell me why she'd wanna talk to you."

"I'm just a messenger boy," Fortescue said, looking wide-eyed and excited for all he was worth, "but my own client is someone who's very interested in talking about a sort of alliance—a merger of interests, we might say—with your own employer."

"Yadda yadda yadda," she said sourly, hefting her stein and glaring at him over it. "Everybody wants a piece of the action when they see someone on her way up to the top. You wanna be more specific?"

"Sure, but not in front of all these people!" Fortescue exclaimed. "If we could step outside and find a quiet spot . . . normally a lady might get nervous at such a proposition from a pair of strangers, but somehow I don't think you're too worried about the two of us _ganging up on you_ when there are no witnesses . . ."

Perhaps he could have timed that better. For a moment I honestly thought she was going to choke on the beer she had just started swallowing—and I wasn't at all sure that a Heimlich maneuver would make enough of an impression on her hide to do the slightest good in clearing out her lungs! Fortunately George had moved away to tend to another customer, so her explosive laughter sprayed droplets across the gantry behind the bar, but didn't actually hit a human target. When she'd got her breathing back to normal, she said in a mellower tone than before, "I like your style, kid. Yeah, you'd better figure Big Abby can take care of herself against any pair of pipsqueaks like you and your ladyfriend. With both hands tied behind my back, even! If I was in a good mood, I'd just let you wear yourselves out hitting me over and over 'till you got tired of ruining your fingers!"

She gulped down the rest of her beer. "Follow me." Fortescue and I left our glasses on the bar and obediently followed. With Big Abby taking point, the crowd parted before her and Fortescue and I found it very quick and easy to get across the floor this time.

Up the stairs to the street, past the bouncer, and around a corner into a dark alley. Then she turned around and said, "Lemme try again. Who are you and who sent you?"

"Did I forget to introduce myself?" Fortescue murmured, looking shame-faced. "I'm Sandy Fortescue, and this is my associate, Esprit." (He pronounced it "ess-PREE" so I figured he'd just translated "Spirit" into French.)

Big Abby said, "'The Abominatrix' is my full handle, these days. Not that I use it much."

_Aha,_ I said to myself, _so that's where "Big Abby" came from! I guess it sounds more feminine than "Big Abo."But this makes _another_ villainess I never heard of before. How many am I going to meet today?_

Big Abby looked at me. "So tell me, Spree . . . why the handcuffs?"

_Careful. Anything I tell her now has to stand up to the scrutiny of her boss, and with my luck, the boss is a supergenius. Keep it simple, Cathy!_

"I'm trying to win a bet," I explained. "If I take them off too soon, I forfeit."

She laughed again. At least this time she didn't have beer in her mouth. "I just hope the payoff is worth it, kid." She didn't wait for an answer; instead she swiveled her head to stare at Fortescue again and said, "So tell me, Sandy-Boy, who you work for."

I casually covered my mouth with my free hand as I yawned. I was hoping this would conceal any involuntary reactions on my "honest face" (as the Enchantress had recently put it) to whatever whopper Fortescue was about to pull out of thin air.

He didn't disappoint me. "I'm here on behalf of Marie LaVeau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans." He paused dramatically, apparently awaiting a reaction.

He didn't get one. I was still carefully yawning, and Big Abby just stared at him, waiting for him to continue. After several seconds he must have realized the name didn't mean anything to her. Smoothly, he started speaking again. "Your boss will surely know of her. Marie has the true power; not just superstitious chantings and empty rituals. Some say she's better at raising the dead and controlling the undead than any other houngan who ever lived. She's tried a couple of really ambitious projects herself, but they didn't work out so well because there are other scholars of the mystic arts who persecute her. But she thinks her talents and your boss's could mesh well to cover each other's weak spots."

Big Abby scowled at him as if she didn't believe a word of it. Fortescue, wisely, held his tongue and looked very calm and patient, as if the final decision couldn't possibly be in doubt.

Big Abby finally said, "Okay, cutie—you get the chance to sell your story to Lady Z. Come along!" She turned and headed down the alley to the far end, then turned left and took us along the backs of two buildings before stopping at the third. She thumped on the back door in a rhythmic code and it quickly opened.

We followed her in. The building was one of those old brownstones that looked like it was still for a single owner instead of having been cut up into smaller apartments on each floor. Big Abby stepped into a staircase and they creaked alarmingly as we followed her up two flights. Then she led us into a large room with shag carpeting and other expensive decorations. Someone was sitting in a high-backed leather swivel chair tapping away at a computer keyboard. The hands looked tanned and feminine, but I couldn't see the head from this angle. The legs were scarcely covered by a dark green miniskirt.

"Boss!" Big Abby growled. "Coupla folks to see you 'bout some voodoo-woman named Marie LaVeau."

The Enchantress had basically bet on my recognizing and instantly distrusting the woman we were about to see. Some sorceress, I'd gathered. If I didn't recognize her, or didn't think she was a real emergency, then I was free to do as I pleased.

The chair rotated around. A mass of dark hair, long and curly, and a frown that somehow looked lovely on her chiseled features . . . and after blinking once or twice at the whole gestalt of her face, I made up my mind. I was at least 90 percent certain I knew who she was. Cap had showed me the dossier SHIELD had compiled on her when she was a self-proclaimed Queen trying to expand her territory further. But the dossier also said Magneto had killed her in front of several witnesses. Even a sorceress would have a hard time bouncing back from that . . . wouldn't she?

Of course, it wasn't outside the bounds of probability for one sorceress to mystically disguise herself as another . . . although I was hard put to see what anyone would gain by pretending to be the notorious _Zaladane._

The Enchantress had just won her bet. If this was the real Zaladane, it was a safe bet her heart was in the wrong place and her resources might be frightening. And if some fool was impersonating her, then she'd just have to face the consequences of such a boneheaded move.

Suddenly I didn't feel so bad about being part of Fortescue's cover story.


	7. Chapter 7: Sequestered

**Chapter Seven: Sequestered**

The lady lounging in the huge leather chair seemed to be sprawled in it. She was wearing what a yuppie would call a "woman's power suit"—her arms and torso were covered with a well-tailored dark green jacket, wide collar, padded shoulders, but she wore a matching miniskirt that showed off her legs to good advantage. Fortescue definitely noticed them.

Zaladane spoke in a lovely voice that sounded like she had professional training in how to use it effectively. "So you say you wish to speak about the Voodoo Queen?"

Fortescue said, oozing humility, "Actually, I bear a message _from_ her. I am Fortescue, one of her many servants. My friend is Esprit."

Zaladane seemed skeptical. "Do you even know who I am?"

Fortescue shrugged theatrically. "I know what my employer told me about the intended recipient of the message. You fit the description quite well. Unless I am greatly mistaken, you are Zaladane, High Priestess of the Sun God, experienced sorceress, onetime assistant to the High Evolutionary, later the self-proclaimed monarch of the Savage Land."

Zaladane nodded. "I have been all of the above. I imagine Marie gave you quite a vivid description, considering the time we both spent taking lessons from Lady Elata. More years ago than I really want to count, come to think of it."

Fortescue frowned. "Hmm? Are you sure you're thinking of the right Marie? I got the distinct impression my boss _only_ knew you by reputation. And I'll be frank—I have no idea who 'Lady Elata' is."

Zaladane laughed. "Indeed! Just my little test for a messenger boy. If you automatically agreed with _anything_ I said about a previous association with your putative employer, it would suggest unpleasant things about your . . . sincerity."

Now she looked at me. "I don't see why the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans would need two messengers at once, though. And don't the handcuffs make you more conspicuous? Not to mention the flashy outfit?"

"My friend's dancing outfit was downright bland by the standards of the club where we were told we could meet Big Abby," Fortescue said smoothly. "The handcuffs are a whole different story—I'll let her tell you about it if she wants to." (I had to admire his skill at passing the buck—now, if my excuse for the cuffs didn't make sense under interrogation, he could claim I had deceived him.)

I told her something that was almost the truth. "I made a bet that I could pull it off—staying handcuffed to Fortescue here—without getting arrested or anything before I came face-to-face with whomever he was supposed to deliver his message to."

"And how high were the stakes?"

I did my best to smirk. "High enough to make it worth the possible embarrassment and inconvenience. Besides, think of the bragging rights now that I've pulled it off!"

Zaladane smiled a cold smile. "I certainly hope those things will be worth the inconvenience yet to come, as well." She shifted her gaze to Fortescue before I could decide what to say to that cryptic remark. "If I understood your little friend properly, she didn't even know my name until the two of you sauntered in here?"

"Not from me, at any rate," Fortescue said innocently. "She lives in this town; I've had some fun times with her before; I asked her to go with me when I went poking around for a way to contact your legwoman, Big Abby. I thought a young couple making the scene would be less conspicuous than a devilishly handsome young man such as myself wandering around without a companion."

There was nothing wrong with Fortescue's freckled face and pug nose, but I'd never have called him 'devilishly handsome.' From Zaladane's soft snort, neither would she. She didn't bother to say so, though, and Fortescue probably meant it as humorous hyperbole. Instead, she told us: "Be that as it may, your friend—and you—both know my name and current address now. In another day, perhaps two at the outside, anything you know won't matter in the slightest, but tonight it could be . . . awkward . . . to have you running around this city spreading gossip. Accordingly, you _will_ be my guests overnight. All the necessities and various creature comforts will be made available to you, and once I am ready to move to another base of operations, there will be no need to detain you. I am sure your mistress will understand, messenger boy."

Fortescue didn't look wildly happy at this news. I probably didn't look ecstatic either, but I suspected _him_ of faking. What Zaladane didn't know was the Enchantress wanted him to butter Zaladane up somehow, which would require him to stay pretty close to her for awhile, wouldn't it? My major problem with the idea was that I didn't dare try to make any phone calls to Avengers Mansion or Cap's hotline using any equipment in this building—which they probably wouldn't let me do, anyway. I might be able to fight my way to a phone anyway, but how many seconds would I have to blurt out a message before someone killed me?

My first attempt to infiltrate a supervillain hideout by posing as a bad girl had been the time I went into a community the Serpent Society had taken over. Coachwhip was the first to meet me. I beat her up and then used her wig and costume to disguise myself. That lasted, oh, about _two minutes_ before I tried to rescue an incapacitated Captain America from them and quickly had the rest of the Serpents coming at me with blood in their collective eye. Two things saved my butt: Jack Flag, who'd already infiltrated the Society, chose that moment to blow his own cover in favor of giving me a hand—and later Force Works showed up and probably saved both of us. Jack and I didn't really know what we were doing at that early stage in our costumed careers, but at least we both survived to get some serious training from Cap afterward! My current imposture as the shady friend of Fortescue, who didn't know or care what all these messages between sorceresses were about, had already lasted a lot more than two minutes, so I was breaking my old record. How long would my luck hold out?

Perhaps Fortescue was waiting for me to respond to Zaladane first. I was perfectly willing to let him carry the ball instead. After a little while, neither of us had actually said anything, and Zaladane spoke again, her eyes flitting back and forth from one face to the other, gauging our reactions. "By the way, we have quite a bit of empty space at the moment. Do you want one room . . . or two?"

"Two," I said firmly. "We're not _that_ close. I've already won the bet, so just let me take these silly cuffs off and then you can steer us wherever you need us to stay for the next day or two."

Zaladane raised a delicate eyebrow. "For someone who didn't even know I was here, much less have any business to conduct with me, you're taking this necessary stay remarkably well. I rather expected outraged protests; even hysteria!"

"Hey, Lady," I said patiently as I fumbled with the handcuff key, "I may not have met you before, but I have heard your reputation. Would it do me a lick of good to argue with your decision about security requirements, now that you've announced it?"

"Probably not," she conceded. "Unless you had something very surprising to say that would force me to reconsider _all_ my plans for the night."

"Yeah, well, I don't know or care what you're doing tonight. So why beat my head against a stone wall pretending that will get me anything except a miserable headache?"

Zaladane grinned; somehow it seemed more warmer, perhaps more natural, than the smile she had used earlier. "You are a remarkably _practical_ young woman! Rather like myself, I should say. We must speak further. But not right now. Your friend still has a message to deliver, and if you are not a fellow servant to the Voodoo Queen, then you don't really need to hear the details of her message or my response. Abby will show you to your room. There's a house phone if you wish to order anything from the kitchen downstairs. Please don't wander about the building without my consent; someone might get . . . overexcited . . . and do you an injury!"

I bobbed my head slightly, as if acknowledging her authority. "Understood. Is there a TV, or anything to read, so I don't get bored stiff too quick?"

"There should certainly be a television," Zaladane said. "If there is a particular book, or type of book, which you desire, call down to the kitchen. They may be able to run an errand." She waved a hand in a graceful gesture that somehow said clearly, _You are dismissed from my presence, peasant._

The Abominatrix was at my elbow in case I missed the signals from her boss. "C'mon, Spree." (She still didn't have my name right. The alias Fortescue had given me, anyway, by translating "Spirit" into French as "Esprit.") I gave Fortescue a friendly wave as I meekly followed the big green woman out of the room and down a staircase to a room on the second floor.

"Here you go," the Abominatrix said, gesturing. "All the comforts of home. You have your own bathroom over on the left. Like Lady Z said, ring if you need anything."

There was a big window and it was heavily barred on the outside. There was a yellow phone on a little table by the bed and it was a safe guess that it was only wired up for in-house calls. There was a TV, some chairs, a larger table suitable for eating meals or playing card games, and various odds and ends. As prison cells went, it wasn't half bad! The only question was how long I would have to spend in it.

"Now if you'll excuse me," the Abominatrix said, trying to be polite, "I better check in with Lady C and find out if she needs anything special before—" She cut herself off. "Well, before we get around to doing other stuff tonight."

_Lady C?_ Now I had another little mystery to solve. Did the Abominatrix's use of the "Lady" honorific mean Lady C was on an equal basis with Lady Z, Zaladane? Partners in crime? I started running through a list of all the villainesses I could think of whose "professional names" began with the letter C. Of course, with my luck, it would turn out to be someone I'd never even heard of before (a category which the Abominatrix herself also fell into, as a matter of fact).


	8. Chapter 8: Blackout

**Chapter Eight: Blackout**

So I was Zaladane's "guest" for the time being. I felt like Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-four,_ knowing that Big Brother was always watching. The bedroom's concealed camera was behind the grille that covered the air vent. The microphone might be in there too, or might be elsewhere; audio sensors are smaller and thus easier to conceal. I didn't really look for a mike; I just took its existence for granted. When I explored the bathroom, I initially suspected the mirror above the vanity of being one-way glass, such as police departments often use in their interrogation rooms, but after examining it carefully, I decided it wasn't. Or most of it wasn't, anyway—it was always possible that I was overlooking one little spot that had been altered from behind, in order to let a camera in a dark room peep through into the constantly well-lit bathroom (which had no wall switch to let me ever turn the lights off).

On the other hand, given that the bathroom only had one door (straight to the bedroom) and no window, it was quite possible that Zaladane hadn't bothered to install any cameras in here at all, since a "guest" such as myself couldn't get away without passing in front of the bedroom camera on the way to the other door (to the corridor) or to the _barred_ window. I was morally certain, though, that the bathroom must be wired for sound, just in case someone tried to have a conspiratorial conversation in there. In old spy novels the characters sometimes turned on all the water taps in a bathroom and then spoke in whispers, confident that the background noise would drown out their chit-chat from mikes planted _anywhere_ in the room, but somehow I didn't think that was a reliable way to avoid _modern_ surveillance equipment. I certainly wouldn't bet my life on it!

It didn't really matter at the moment—I had no one handy to conspire with. Fortescue might want to talk things over after he was done selling his snow job to Zaladane, but I strongly doubted he was dumb enough to assume the "guest quarters" in her brownstone wouldn't be bugged. If he did prove dumb enough to try to have a cozy little chat with me about matters that Zaladane really didn't need to hear about, I'd have to find a way to shut him up in a hurry. In an absolute worst-case scenario, I might even kiss him (ewww!) in order to save my own life, but there _had to be_ a better way. (Fleetingly, the thought occurred to me—did Fortescue know Morse Code? If both parties are fluent in it, there are ways to have a meaningful conversation without pronouncing a single word, without writing anything down, and without even silently mouthing things that a good lip reader can interpret.)

If I could find a way to get a secret message out of the building, then I could alert Captain America and the Avengers—or failing that, the Fantastic Four or the New York City field office of S.H.I.E.L.D.—that Zaladane was lurking right here while she prepared for . . . something. Of course, I didn't want to die in the process, so I'd want to send a message that the bedroom's electronic eye and ear wouldn't detect. That eliminated writing out a message on paper, smashing the window, shoving the message out between the bars, and hoping that a good citizen found it and called an appropriate phone number. A haphazard method, anyway, and one that would almost certainly see poor little Cathy Webster messily dead before any reinforcements could possibly arrive.

While I was thinking about this, I was also finding the remote and turning on the television. "Esprit," the party girl whom Fortescue had simply asked to accompany him to a club, was not trying to find a way out of here. Esprit was not eager to transmit a message. Esprit should look no more than mildly restless to anyone actually monitoring the camera (or cameras, if I had missed any) in this room. I found a sitcom and watched it as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. And besides, I told myself while I smiled at the foolish misunderstandings on the TV screen, whatever Zaladane was up to, she was planning to turn me loose after a day or two, apparently when she would be skipping town herself. Plenty of time to set the Big-Name Heroes on her trail before she could likely complete whatever self-serving scheme she was pursuing!

The sitcom was followed by another, which was followed by another. I was in the middle of the third one when the lights flickered . . . came back . . . flickered again . . . then they and the TV screen went completely black for about two seconds . . . came back to life for an instant and then changed their minds again. This time everything stayed dark for a lot longer. After thirty seconds, I got up and moved carefully over to the barred window to peer out at the night life in Manhattan. Buildings across the street were still lit up. For that matter, so was a street lamp just in front of the building, on this side of the street. I began to suspect that the brownstone had its own local power source, totally separate from the grid that supplied juice to the rest of this neighborhood. And now something had overloaded it?

People were speaking to each other in the corridor outside my door. I toyed with the idea of trying to sneak out of the building in the darkness; rejected it. For one thing, I might very well get caught. Zaladane was a sorceress; who knew what sort of security precautions she might have that _didn't_ deactivate when the flow of electricity was cut off? And it would be awfully embarrassing if the lights came back on just as I was reaching out to open a door on the ground floor, and Big Abby (or Zaladane herself, or any other tough customer) spotted me.

Most importantly: I didn't really have much to report to the authorities at the moment. Finding out what Zaladane was up to still looked like the most viable plan.

Of course, I told myself virtuously after I figured a solid six minutes of darkness had gone past, the civilian party girl known as Esprit wouldn't just be content to sit here forever. She wouldn't have the training in meditation techniques that Free Spirit had; she'd get all bored and restless.

Nobody had actually said _Stay in your room for the next ten hours, Esprit,_ I reflected as I headed for the door. But it might be best to announce my presence. . . .

I opened the door. There was a little light coming through the barred window behind me, but the rest of the corridor seemed pitch-black; no windows. "Hello?" I called brightly. "What's wrong? Anything I can do to help?"

No one answered. If cross-examined later, I would say I figured that meant I might be needed.

As near as I could tell, the third floor was deserted except for myself. I remembered where the staircase was and found the door to it by touch. I made a mental note that I ought to start carrying a battery-powered light source in my costume for such situations. Then I started asking myself if going down to the second floor was really such a bright idea. I didn't actually seem to be in any danger on the third, and there was no rush. I was willing to take all sorts of risks in a good cause, but would this one really have any potential payoff to balance the risks?

_Don't be silly, Cathy,_ I chided myself. _Just because the lady of the house is a megalomaniac sorceress who seems to have come back from the dead somehow . . . just because her hired muscle looks like something from an old monster movie . . . just because either one would kill you in a heartbeat if she thought it necessary . . . just because you don't know how many other bad guys are in this house . . . just because it's pitch-black out here in the corridors . . . is any of that a good reason to be scared of the idea of prowling around the house right now?_

I thought about what I had just thought. _Hmm . . . let me rephrase that!_

I kept prowling, though. _Captain America_ wouldn't have just sat in a dark room all night waiting for Zaladane to condescend to remember his presence. . . . of course, Cap would have his bulletproof shield. All I had was a policeman's nightstick that nobody had bothered to confiscate. (I was fairly certain Big Abby's thick green hide was as bulletproof as Cap's shield, so it came as no surprise that she didn't care about a simple piece of wood.)

Down the stairwell in total darkness—it would be nice if Zaladane had installed a few battery-powered emergency lights at each doorway, but she evidently hadn't felt the need. (Something she had said earlier had suggested this building was only a very temporary base of operations for her; maybe that was why she hadn't bothered to spruce it up with all the bells and whistles of a proper "secret headquarters.")

I went through the exit at the second floor, not wanting to look (if anyone was monitoring my movements) as if I were in any frantic hurry to "escape." I called out "Hello?" a few more times as I moved about; no one called back.

Someone was just behind me. The darkness and danger had my senses more alert than usual, but even so I was just barely aware of a very light-footed person coming up behind. Definitely not Big Abby. Esprit probably shouldn't notice a thing, so I didn't.

Suddenly a small (feminine?) hand grabbed my right wrist and quickly established a classic wristlock, immobilizing that hand for all practical purposes. It was done just hard enough to make it clear that I'd probably hurt myself if I tried to struggle against the other person's grip. Cap had taught me a few possible reactions to such a move, but I decided to play dumb—freeze and yelp something incoherent.

"Don't move," a soft voice said in an accent I couldn't place. (Not anything European, I thought. Maybe somewhere in the Far East? A region I knew almost nothing about.)

"Okay, okay!" I said hastily. "I don't want any trouble!"

"Then why were you creeping about in the dark?" my assailant demanded. I was almost certain it was a woman, now, although she was behind me and I couldn't have seen her even if I turned around.

"Because I didn't have a flashlight," I explained. "I don't like being all alone in the dark. When I realized the power wasn't coming back quickly, I thought maybe I could find someone who'd give me a spare candle or something!"

"Ah. That almost makes sense. I think we shall ask my employer what she wants done with you."

"You mean Zaladane?"

"No, my contract is with her partner . . . whom the others in this house call Lady C. She will share another name with you if she pleases. It is not for me to breach her privacy, however."

"Speaking of which, I'm Esprit."

"You may call me Black Lotus."

No bells ringing in my head . . . I didn't even know if she might have any honest-to-goodness superpowers, or just some training in martial arts, or what! I was _definitely_ going to spend some extra hours going over the files of obscure villains after I got out of here.

Black Lotus steered me back toward the door to the stairwell. "All the way down, Esprit. Most of the household is currently gathered in the basement. I am not certain as to whether their enterprise was successful before we lost the power."

Unless the "enterprise" had been meant to kill someone, I hoped it had been successful. Might put "Lady Z" (Zaladane) and "Lady C" (whoever) in a better mood.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Black Lotus has only appeared in two story arcs in the Marvel Universe to the best of my knowledge, and the last one was in 1991. It was about time to dust her off! Her new employer, "Lady C," is even more obscure than that, but has also appeared in Marvel's regular continuity at least once. Feel free to speculate wildly as to what her full villain-alias will turn out to be in the next installment! 


	9. Chapter 9: Basement

**Chapter Nine: Basement**

I moved slower than Black Lotus liked as we went down the stairs. She mentioned this twice. Each time, my excuse was that it was pitch black and I didn't want to trip and break my neck. I didn't even bother pointing out that I was also hindered by the way she was keeping my right hand trapped behind my back in a nasty wristlock; she already knew that. Captain America had run me through several training exercises in similar conditions—sometimes in darkness, sometimes just blindfolding me—so I could have moved a bit faster and more confidently, even on staircases, but I figured Black Lotus didn't need to know that.

Finally there were no more stairs; just a wooden door in front of my nose. I groped for the knob with my left hand and said, "Okay, lady, I'm ready to open it."

"Go ahead, then," said her soft voice with its accent that I couldn't place. (Korean? Vietnamese? What did I know from Far Eastern accents? We didn't have many Asian immigrants in my home town, and I hadn't been in the Big Apple long enough to develop much expertise in making these distinctions.)

I opened the door. Overhead light fixtures were still dark in this basement, but there was some illumination. Mainly from portable "lanterns" actually running off batteries rather than burning regular fuel. At least you could see your hand in front of your face now.

Over on the left, something like one-third of a huge room was filled with masses of gleaming equipment that looked like something out of a summer blockbuster movie. I had no idea what their purpose was.

Over against a concrete wall on the right was one big metal casing—roughly four feet high and seven feet wide, give or take—that looked as if it ought to contain computer equipment. There was no other equipment or furniture within twenty feet of it, but Zaladane was standing near it, still wearing her dark green "power suit." Kneeling nearby, operating a powered screwdriver, was a woman in coveralls (dark blue and baggy). Her features might have been Japanese. She had long black hair. Her eyes were covered by a visor that connected to gleaming bits of metal wrapping around her skull.

"Lady C?" I asked Black Lotus quietly.

"Indeed," her voice said, even softer than mine, from just behind my right ear as she peered over my shoulder (or so I assumed she was doing—I still hadn't even seen her face).

Lady C extracted another screw and pulled a panel off one end of the casing. She unclipped a flashlight from her coveralls and shined it into the innards of what she had just opened.

A minute passed while she poked around in there, muttering "Hmm . . ." and "Well, that didn't melt" and other encouraging noises.

"So, partner mine," Zaladane finally inquired in a silken tone, "did my own mystical participation actually succeed in 'boosting the signal' of your contraption to a sufficient degree to thoroughly defeat the Tempo's defenses?"

"Well, we certainly brought _something_ back via the carrier wave, this time," Lady C said in an abstracted tone. "Exterior and interior both appear 'normal,' at first glance. That's already better results than my solo efforts against the Tempo ever yielded, but I'll need some time—_after_ the power's back on—before I can say if this unit survived the transition unscathed and is really worth the trouble we took."

She added, "And then, of course, you'll need to test the things my instruments can't—" as she rose smoothly to her feet. Then she must have seen me—and my captor—just inside the doorway as she turned. She stopped talking to Zaladane in favor of asking, "Who's your blond friend, Lotus?"

"She calls herself 'Esprit,'" Black Lotus said. "I found her creeping down a hallway on the second floor. She says after the lights went out and stayed out, she began looking for someone who could provide her with illumination. It has a certain simple plausibility."

"Silly child," Zaladane said. "You could have just gone to sleep, there in your room, and when you woke up, everything would be all right and breakfast would be cooking downstairs."

"Sleep? I'm a night owl," I insisted. "It probably isn't even midnight yet, right? Around now, a party hosted by one of my friends would usually just be getting into gear!"

"A party here would be premature," Zaladane said thoughtfully. "We don't know if we have anything to celebrate. Although once we regain power for the equipment—" She broke off and turned her head to call toward the far end of the basement. "How goes it with the generators?"

"The three that were running were all skragged by the backlash, Lady Z," a man's voice called back from somewhere I couldn't see. "Dead losses, we've decided. We've almost got the spare ready to take on the load of the household grid—but give us another minute to be safe!"

"Carry on!" Zaladane called. She glanced back my way. "Oh, let go of the poor girl's wrist already, Lotus," she said in an amused tone. "If you can't guarantee to handle any trouble one silly American girl might cause, even when she has both hands free, then what is my esteemed partner paying you for?"

Black Lotus didn't let go. _Right,_ I reflected, _she must only take orders from her employer, the other partner._ Then Lady C nodded once and the pressure promptly disappeared from my right wrist. I brought my hand around in front of my torso and started rubbing the sore spots with my left hand. It occurred to me that I still hadn't seen Black Lotus—I twisted around enough to look at her, still standing just behind me and to the right. She was an Asian woman, about my height, looking young and slender, wearing a flowing green thing that ran from her neck to her ankles but left her arms quite bare. Her hair was collar-length. She was giving me a calm, unruffled look that suggested she was _absolutely confident_ of her ability to handle any fuss I might cause. I hoped she was wrong about that, but I wasn't going to test it right now. Best to let her think I knew absolutely nothing about the martial arts, and was easily intimidated by those who did.

Meanwhile, the visored woman had apparently been looking at me while I was studying her hired help, although I couldn't see anything of Lady C's eyes through the visor, so I had to take it on faith that they were even open. At any rate—after (presumably) studying me for several seconds, she asked, "What name does she know me by?"

"Just that you are my employer, 'Lady C,'" Black Lotus said.

"Well, she won't be telling anyone about this before I'm a thousand kilometers away," said Lady C. "So! You may have heard of me, girl, under the name 'Cathode.'"

I shook my head, and I wasn't dissembling. Who was Cathode?

"Fame is fleeting," Lady C said with a theatrical sigh. "Once upon a time I added the Statue of Liberty to my collection—and for several days I thought I'd never hear the end of it. But after I disappeared from federal custody I had the sense to lie low for awhile, and some other 'flavor of the week' took my place in the notoriously short attention span of the American public. And then yet another 'flavor of the week' must have stolen the spotlight from him, and so forth, and now who remembers the unique genius of poor little Cathode and her long-distance teleportation rays?"

I blinked. That actually rang a bell. There _had_ been a brief fuss in the media some time ago, when I was just another undergraduate who had no inkling I could ever become one of Captain America's apprentices. I remembered, vaguely, that the Statue had disappeared for a few days—and then was restored, good as new, to its proper place on Liberty Island. Hadn't Silver Sable and her Wild Pack been involved in that recovery? But if the last story about it in the local paper had mentioned the name of the thief, I'd long since forgotten. I hadn't been too worried when I heard about the disappearance—the Avengers and the Fantastic Four and their other colleagues in the Big Apple seemed to deal with such problems on a weekly basis, after all, with very little lasting harm done.

(I was none too clear on why supervillains almost never went on colorful crime sprees in, say, Lansing or Minneapolis, but I'd been just as glad—back then—that they mostly seemed to concentrate on capers in and around New York and California, for no apparent reason. Living midway between those areas, I'd figured I was pretty safe. I kept believing that until Superia tricked me into becoming her guinea pig . . .)

Suddenly the basement was flooded with light and there was a mechanical humming sound coming from the far end. "We're good!" called the voice of the same man who had given a status report before.

"Splendiferous!" said Zaladane. "Lotus, escort Esprit back to her room on the third floor. Your employer and I have some tests to run on our prize."

Again, there was a significant pause before Lady C—Cathode—endorsed that order, then Black Lotus said, with the air of a woman being generous against her better judgment, "If you care to start up the stairs right now, girl, I won't need to use your arm to steer you."

I nodded and turned back toward the staircase. I'd already seen enough to get me thinking hard about what Zaladane and Cathode might be up to. If only I knew what sort of equipment was normally kept in the place they called "the Tempo" . . . I wondered if Fortescue knew where that was.

* * *

**Author's Note: **I suspect many of my readers didn't recognize Cathode when she was revealed as Zaladane's partner, the previously-mentioned "Lady C." She is not my own creation; she once had a brief but interesting career as a Marvel villain. In "Silver Sable and the Wild Pack #6" the Statue of Liberty had mysteriously vanished. Silver Sable, her Wild Pack, and their temporary ally Deathlok all worked on the case. On the final page of that issue, Silver and Deathlok came face-to-face with Cathode in her debut appearance. Naturally, they spent all of #7 fighting her and her minions, ultimately triumphing, with Cathode captured and the Statue returned to its rightful place. 

So they arrested her, but how long did the authorities manage to hang onto her after the story ended? There's no telling! To the best of my knowledge, Cathode has _never_ been heard from again! Naturally, that made her a perfect fit for this serial, since it amuses me to have the Very Obscure Heroine keep bumping into Very Obscure Villainesses at regular intervals . . . (for instance, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, Black Lotus has not appeared in any Marvel comics since 1991; for my purposes, I assume she was later hired by Cathode as a mercenary/bodyguard/whatever).


	10. Chapter 10: Socializing

**Chapter Ten: Socializing**

I made it to the door to "my" room on the third floor without incident. Black Lotus, trailing a few steps behind, had moved very quietly, but I never doubted she was there, watching in case I tried anything stupid. I paused with my hand on the doorknob and turned around to look at her again. "Excuse me, Ms. Lotus—"

"Just 'Black Lotus.' No honorifics, please."

"Um? Okay, I'll take it from the top. Excuse me, Black Lotus, but I'm not real clear on the ground rules. No one said before that I had to stay in this single room all night. Is that the rule now, or can I stroll around a bit, talk to other people, that sort of thing?"

Black Lotus paused for a moment's thought, then smiled faintly. "Interesting point, young Esprit. Lady Z said to escort you back to your room. She didn't say anything about tying you up to ensure you stayed _right here_ until sunrise. If you're lonely and not yet drowsy, you might find some company elsewhere on this floor—there's a room we use as a lounge, down that way and around the corner." She pointed. "I strongly advise you not to leave _this_ floor, though. It might be taken amiss." I nodded vigorously, doing my best to look intimidated at the prospect of having Black Lotus catch me wandering about the second floor all over again.

Black Lotus glided away, back toward the stairwell, and I turned on my heel and moved toward the lounge she had mentioned.

I hadn't seen my putative ally, Fortescue, for a few hours now. I hadn't missed him much, either—cold-blooded con men tend to repel me. But he could be charming enough when he cared to make the effort, and it appeared that he had done so again. In a wide room that had two televisions, two VCRs, a stereo, and other paraphernalia, Fortescue was sitting at a table shuffling a deck of cards under the eyes of three women I hadn't met before. His fingers manipulated the cards fast enough to make me wonder if he'd ever worked as a blackjack dealer.

"And now for my next trick!" he was saying as I paused in the doorway to survey the situation. "A goldie oldie, but still going strong! May I have a volunteer from the audience?"

A woman dressed in a white bodysuit, topped off with a white hooded cloak with a hem so ragged it had to be deliberate, raised her hand. "I'll try anything once."

"Splendid!" Fortescue exclaimed. He shuffled the deck once more, then fanned it out, cards facing downward so no one could see their values, and said, "Okay, pick a card, any card, show it to your friends, but _don't_ let _me _see it, that's the ticket, okay, got it memorized? Good! Put it back, face down, on top of the deck." By the time he finished that speech, he had already squared the cards and left the deck in the middle of the table so she could drop her card onto it. Once she had done so, he said, "Okay, please pick up the deck and cut the cards twice so your card is buried among the others."

She did.

"Now, just to make it fair, pass it to the left, to Marian, and have her cut the cards twice."

The lady in white—I thought she might be Whiteout, one of the Savage Land Mutates mentioned in Zaladane's file—passed it to a big woman whose costume made me think she was either Poundcakes, formerly of the Grapplers, or else some other very hefty woman who had stolen Poundcakes' laundry for some odd reason. If this was Poundcakes, then she was frighteningly strong. She cut the cards carefully, twice.

"Right!" said Fortescue. "Now, pass it to the lady on _your_ left, so _she_ can cut the cards twice!"

A dusky-skinned young woman wearing a maid's uniform—plain black dress with a white apron over it; no mask or other fancy stuff—did the honors that time. 

"Thank you kindly! I'll take it back now!" Fortescue scooped up the deck, turned it so that the fronts of the cards were facing him, and started flipping through. "Hmmm. Ah yes . . . now I've got it! _This_ was your card, it still has something of your own aura about it!"

Fortescue slipped the card out and spun it around to show us the eight of clubs. The maid grinned approvingly. The lady in white—I decided to just think of her as Whiteout—gasped: "How—you never—_three of us_ all cut those cards to mess up the sequence before you even got to _touch_ the deck again!"

"Lemme see it," Poundcakes said skeptically. "He coulda marked it somehow."

"When?" Whiteout demanded. "He couldn't know which card I was going to pick before I picked it, could he? I mean, what good would it do him to mark all the aces, when I didn't pick an ace? And after I put it down, he never touched any of the cards until we'd cut them _six times!_"

Poundcakes was peering at the back of the eight of clubs as she muttered, "Sometimes _all_ the cards are marked, y'know?" Then she grabbed two other cards from the deck and peered at their backs for comparison. After several seconds she said, more good-humoredly than I'd expected, "Okay, so I don't see any difference between their backs, this time."

"You certainly shouldn't, unless _someone else_ rigged this deck, so as to cheat at a game, before I ever got _my_ hands on it," Fortescue assured her, his voice throbbing with hurt innocence. He widened his eyes, pressed one hand over his heart, and said soulfully, "There are some _awfully_ dishonest people out there, you know."

That got laughs from the audience, along with comments of "No, really?" and "Tell me about it!"

(I was keeping my mouth shut. The answer was simple, really. He didn't need anything so crude as marked cards, nor a special deck that consisted of 52 copies of the same card. I had known the gimmick for this one since I was in sixth grade, when I got interested in stage magic and checked out a book of card tricks from the library—but I figured these women hadn't been all that scholarly in their childhoods. Still and all, no need to spoil his fun!)

"Hello, Esprit!" Fortescue said pleasantly, nodding to me across the room. "Didn't see you around before. Where've you been?"

"Quick trip to the basement," I said briefly. "Going to show us another trick?"

"Actually, I was about to suggest we could give that a rest and just kill another hour or two playing some sort of friendly game. Care to join us? How are you at poker, for instance?" 

Poundcakes said pointedly, "Buster, after the things ya just proved ya can do with a deck, we'd hafta be loony to bet money against ya."

"Money?" Fortescue exclaimed, sounding as if the vulgar subject of cold cash could never appeal to such a clean-cut and freckled lad as himself. "What do you take me for, some sort of shameless chiseler with an extra ace up each sleeve?" 

"Gee, lemme think about it fer a minute before committin' myself," Poundcakes said drily.

"The point is," Fortescue continued in a long-suffering tone, "that I was thinking of just playing for _fun._ Are there any poker chips around? We could hand everybody the same amount and just keep going until someone had all the chips, or until we decided to quit for the night. No real stakes; just a way to keep score. Prove who's luckier!" 

"Or sneakier," groused Poundcakes, but she was already rummaging through a nearby cabinet and hauling out a box full of chips—red, white, and blue plastic disks. "Okay, folks," she said. "Poker is the name of the game; who's interested?" 

Hands went up. Fortescue, Whiteout, Poundcakes, the lady in the maid uniform, and I were all in. In my case it was just to be sociable, and not because I expected to win. The fact that I _never_ gamble for real money meant I lacked the expertise that the other players presumably had, but I did remember the basic rules and the rankings of each type of hand. Straight flush at the top of the ladder, followed by four of a kind, and so forth.

"Righto," said Poundcakes. "In Atlantic City, white is worth one, red is five, blue is ten. Any objections?"

None of us expressed any.

"Let's just make it two hundred apiece in chips, then," she said, counting them out very quickly. "Do we want a limit on the maximum raise?"

"What for?" Whiteout asked. "I want to be able to say 'I'm going all in!' when it will do me the _most_ good."

"Same here," said the maid. Fortescue and I didn't argue.

"Okay, no bettin' limit. Means ya can bet and lose the full two hundred on yer first hand, if ya happen to feel like it," Poundcakes conceded. She shoved stacks of chips toward each of us as she added, "But when ya go broke, don't come cryin' to me fer more chips!"

We worked out some other rules before the first deal. Five-card draw was the game; no exceptions. But the dealer of each hand could choose which cards, if any, were wild for that hand. I had a terrible suspicion that Poundcakes had watched too many John Wayne films in her day and preferred to play her poker the way she figured real macho types did back in the Old West. Given that she had to be far and away the strongest person in the room, though, no one seemed inclined to argue with her about the petty details. And once we got started she took the game seriously, without trying to invent any extra rules in the middle of the play. I found myself wondering just how much time low-level supervillains (and miscellaneous flunkies, such as the maid might be) _normally_ spent just playing cards while waiting for the opportune moment to launch their next heist. 

Nothing important happened in the first half hour or so. Twice I tried to bluff big, and twice I got hammered for it. I wondered if the Enchantress had actually had a point about my face being too honest for my own good. Then I bluffed and scared Whiteout and Fortescue into folding (unless they'd been bluffing too?) and decided there was hope for me yet. I wasn't trying very hard to calculate the odds on improving any given hand each time I drew; I was just staying in the game while I tried to figure out how I could safely raise the question of what, exactly, "Lady Z" and "Lady C" thought they were doing down in the basement. I didn't want to seem too eager to ask questions; wasn't that a classic mistake for cops trying to work undercover? But on the other hand, it was natural that a temporary guest" such as "Esprit" would be mildly curious. If I could find the right excuse in the chitchat that was circulating around the table. . . .

The decision was finally taken out of my hands when Poundcakes raised the subject directly; possibly trying to distract me from the play as much as anything. "So, Esprit, what was goin' on downstairs?"

"You mean, in the basement?"

"Sure. The lights all went out—never happened before—ya were down there right after, yeah? So what's up?"

"Black Lotus wanted to ask Lady Z and Lady C what to do with me." I shrugged. "I was only down there for a couple of minutes, and didn't even understand what I saw. Raise five."

Poundcakes shoved another red chip into the pot. "I see ya."

"Raise five," said Fortescue. "So what's in the basement, anyway? A demon from another world?" 

"Raise five," said Whiteout.

"Didn't look like it," I said idly. "Lots of fancy equipment that I think belongs to Cathode. I never heard of her before."

Yvonne (I had learned this was the maid's name) sighed and let her hand fall to the table. "Fold."

"Call," I said, pushing out a blue chip.

"Izzat all?" Poundcakes was clearly disappointed. "Just the same old equipment Big Abby and I carried downstairs for them? What did it do, short-circuit and blow out a generator? Call."

"Well, no," I conceded (while Fortescue silently considered his hand, hesitating to bet on it). "Over on one side of the room, all by itself, there was some great big metal case that looked like it might hold a computer or something. Cathode was poking around in it, like it just got there and she needed to check its condition. That's all I know." I shrugged again to show how helplessly uninformed I was, while Fortescue gave up and folded.

Whiteout raised by another blue chip and said, "Ah, then they must have finally penetrated the defenses of the Tempo."

Zaladane had said something about that, but I played dumb. "Tempo? Raise ten."

"Sure," said Poundcakes, glaring at her own hand. "Some ritzy skyscraper that's got some kinda hi-tech magical swag in it." She finally folded rather than throw twenty more into the pot just to stay in, and now it was down to Whiteout and me. She raised another ten, I raised twenty, she called . . . as it turned out, she had a straight and I had a flush. (It helped that deuces were wild in this hand.) I raked in the chips and figured I wouldn't be dropping out of the game too soon. If the showdown had gone the other way, though, I'd have been darn close to stone cold broke.

It was my turn to deal. As I shuffled the pasteboards, I returned to the subject I had deliberately ignored for the last minute or two. "You said something about hi-tech and magical, Marian? I didn't think those two ideas went well together."

"They do for Doctor Doom," Whiteout observed as I started dealing. "But he's a special case. Why did you think Cathode found she needed to strike a bargain with my liege, Zaladane? Because her fancy teleportation rays just weren't cutting it where mystic shielding was concerned, and besides, even if she got what she wanted, it might take all of the expertise both of them can offer to finally get one of those captured devices to function properly!"

I said, "I really wouldn't know; I only just met both of them. Magic is all Greek to me, anyway." Having learned a few things, I carefully didn't raise the subject again, in any way, shape, or form, during the remainder of my time in the game.

An hour later, Yvonne and Poundcakes had both been cleaned out, and I was down to my last few chips. Whiteout and Fortescue were about tied in the sizes of their stacks of chips. I told myself I hadn't really been trying very hard. I got four hearts on the deal, went all in, drew a diamond, and knew I was busted. "That's it for Momma's little girl Esprit," I said, yawning vigorously. "I'm ready for some shut-eye. If the end of the world starts while I'm asleep, don't bother waking me; I didn't really want to watch it anyway."

I headed down the corridor to "my" room. As I lay down and pulled up the covers to my chin (having locked the door first, for whatever that was worth in an enemy's lair), I reflected that my best bet was to keep cool and just wait another day or two until Zaladane and Cathode had packed up their new toy and hit the road with it. Zaladane really seemed to accept Fortescue's credentials as an "ambassador" from Marie LaVeau; she'd probably stay true to her word and turn us loose once we couldn't hurt her any by revealing the location of a base she would already have abandoned. . . .

On that note, I drifted off. 


	11. Chapter 11: Lunchtime

**

* * *

**

Chapter Eleven: Lunchtime 

There was a clock radio on a lamp table near the bed, but I hadn't fiddled with it to set an alarm before dozing off. The upshot was that I'd slept for at least eight hours before awakening just after ten o'clock in the morning. Longer than usual, for me, even after a hard day of dodging supervillains and traveling a strange world and so forth.

First I did calisthenics in the middle of the bedroom, following a regimen that, just a year ago, would have made me collapse somewhere in the middle. Mindful of the concealed camera I'd previously spotted, I paced myself and only did about half as much as I'd normally do these days. Nobody needed to know what my real endurance was. I didn't practice any kata at all; I nursed the hope that nobody realized I had a clue about the martial arts. If I had to make a break for it, the element of surprise might give me a (very brief?) advantage. . . .

After I had done enough exercise to let my muscles know they couldn't take the day off, I started to head for the shower—and then paused in the doorway to the bathroom. What was I going to wear after I was clean? Pulling on the same patriotic red-white-and-blue outfit I'd worn yesterday would pretty well defeat the purpose of taking a shower in the first place, after all I'd put that costume through within the past twenty-four hours. There must be a way to launder it in this establishment, but until then?

There was a closet in this bedroom that I hadn't even bothered to explore last night. I corrected that omission now. Two loose sweatsuits, an unwrinkled blouse, some T-shirts, jeans and sweaters, a collection of stray socks, two pairs of nylons, even several bits and pieces of underwear still sealed in the factory's plastic wrappers. Most of the items in the closet looked to be meant for women. Someone had made an effort to prepare this room for sudden occupancy by a female "guest" who didn't have any luggage with her. It seemed a safe guess that Fortescue had been given a room similarly equipped for unexpected male guests. I'd never really worried before about the logistics of doing proper housekeeping in a supervillain's secret lair; I wondered whether Zaladane or Cathode had been the one who assigned hired help to worry about such things in this brownstone for the duration of their stay.

Anyway: After taking my shower, I pulled on clothes, ending up with blue jeans and a cream-colored sweater over incidentals, and felt decent enough to face the other occupants of the household again. (Just how many were there? No one had said.) I toyed with the idea of at least wearing the blue mask that should cover the upper part of my face and then decided not to bother. I'd had it on when I arrived and nobody here had cared—they'd apparently swallowed the story (which resembled the truth) that my "patriotic" ensemble was supposed to be a dancing outfit. But it wasn't like anyone in this building was going to recognize the unmasked face of "Esprit" as belonging to Cathy Webster. Aside from Cap and a few of his friends, who in the Big Apple had ever _heard_ of Cathy Webster? I decided that _looking_ as if I had nothing to hide was the most important thing at the moment, considering how much I really did need to keep hiding!

That settled, I bundled up my "Free Spirit" outfit, silently giving thanks that none of the villains living under this roof had ever heard of that identity either, and headed out in search of laundry facilities.

There was a middle-aged woman, wearing the same sort of maid's uniform as Yvonne, vacuuming the lounge where a bunch of us had played poker last night. I asked her if there were any washing machines in the building. "Ground floor, behind the kitchen," she said. I thanked her and headed back for the stairs. Soon I was in a room with a bank of eight washing machines along one wall, and eight dryers piled up against another. Five of the washers were going strong at the moment, but I found a half-full bottle of detergent and started my load in one of the others, after making sure the controls were set to use _cold_ water all the way.

(My costume was mostly spandex. There are a few basic rules for laundering the stuff: Don't use hot water. Don't dry on the hottest setting. Don't use chlorine bleach. And although spandex _can_ be ironed without damage if you're very careful, it's usually not worth the trouble. As long as I abided by those rules, cleaning a costume was a prosaic task. These last few months, I'd had enough practice to qualify as an expert on the subject!)

These were fast machines that only took about 30 minutes to wash and 30 minutes to dry. Having nothing better to do, I hung around the laundry room all that time, waiting. Another uniformed maid came in at one point and rotated the loads from the other washers; I stayed out of her way. I wondered just how much dirty laundry a supervillain hideout must produce in any given day . . . did the maids get extra training in removing bloodstains?

By the time my costume came out of the dryer it was almost noon. I tossed everything in a plastic bag, but decided there was no rush about changing back into it. "Esprit" wasn't about to go dancing, so why insist on wearing a putative "dancing outfit" all the time? Besides, my stomach was beginning to complain of neglect. I'd taken it for granted that I'd missed breakfast, but there must be some sort of lunch arrangements coming up soon, right?

I inquired in the kitchen. A fat woman with a food-spattered apron, obviously the cook, told me a buffet had just been laid out in "the front room." I moved down the hall and found that room, just to the left of the front door. There was a strong temptation to casually open that door, step down into the street, and see how far I could get . . . but I'd been told not to leave the brownstone, and somehow I didn't think Zaladane was counting on the _honor system_ to keep me confined. So as I moved past the door, I didn't even touch the knob.

The buffet was certainly well-stocked. Standing at the buffet table and filling a plate was a woman with blazing red hair cascading halfway down her back. She wore white jacket and boots, with black leggings, but the most striking thing was the assault rifle slung from her shoulder. When she turned to glance at me, I saw she also had some shades that looked more like a visor—the dark material over her eyes was one solid piece stretching across her face, instead of two separate little lenses set in frames as I'd normally expect.

"Hello," she said in a crisp tone. "New here?"

"Just a guest who'll be moving on in another day or two, according to Lady Z," I said, doing my best to sound nonchalant. "Call me Esprit."

"Anarchy," she said. I took a moment to decide that was probably her name instead of a comment about local conditions. I didn't ask her to confirm that. The redhead appeared to be a big believer in putting lots of bread and fried meat in her diet . . . I wondered how long she'd keep that trim waistline at this rate. I was more careful; I started with a salad and an orange, telling myself I'd come back for seconds later, to make up for the missed breakfast. There must have been twenty different dishes on the table; I gathered Anarchy and I were the first and second to arrive at the buffet. Would Whiteout and Fortescue and the others be drifting in any minute now?

It was when Anarchy finished loading up her plate—and I mean _loaded_; she had to be a hearty eater!—that I finally placed her general "look." As she turned away from the buffet and moved past me to find a seat across the room, I saw her white belt had a big buckle shaped like the letter U—then I realized in a flash that if she'd been wearing a white mask to cover her entire head, topped off with a dark hat, she'd've been the spitting image of an ULTIMATUM terrorist in full uniform.

Something odd about that—I couldn't see Zaladane, onetime queen of the Savage Land, making an alliance with such an anti-nationalist outfit. But I decided to play dumb and act as if Anarchy were simply wearing a spiffy black-and-white outfit for no special reason. I decided it was a good thing my red-white-and-blue duds were still inside a bag; if I'd been wearing them, I probably would have had to listen to her recite one of the long-winded lectures of Flag-Smasher, the founder of ULTIMATUM, about the evils of festooning one's self with the star-spangled banner (or any other nation's banner). Under other circumstances—such as if I weren't undercover and weren't in a building full of villains—I might have welcomed a rousing debate on the subject, but this just wasn't the time for it.

It was probably just as well that Anarchy didn't appear to be feeling chatty right now. Instead, she seized knife and fork and steadily worked her way from one side of her plate to the other, taking no prisoners and tolerating no distractions. I tried to estimate how many _calories_ she was consuming in a single sitting. After she went back to the buffet to _refill_ her plate, I kicked my estimate up to 4000, minimum. She was also washing all the food down with swigs of an orange-flavored soda drink; I wasn't sure how many more hundreds of calories that added to the grand total.

I had finished off my salad and was eating a serving of brown rice (seasoned with little bits of broiled chicken) when the same uniformed maid I'd seen in the laundry room caught my eye again as she walked past the buffet room on her way to the front door. She opened it and stepped out. I told myself again that I didn't really want to make a dash for the door, so I lowered my gaze to my plate and started to scoop up more rice—then Anarchy was on her feet and raising the rifle to her shoulder, aiming toward the front door. I dropped my fork and stood up too. "What's wrong?" I asked softly.

"Monique went out and the door started to swing shut behind her," Anarchy whispered. "Then it stopped in mid-swing, opened again, and _stayed_ that way." She stepped sideways, keeping her finger on the trigger and her weapon trained on the door, ready to blaze away at any stranger who might be trying to sneak in. I was staying back, well out of the line of fire, but watching the area around the doorway just as intently as Anarchy was. I'd've sworn absolutely nothing was happening . . . then Anarchy made a gasping sound and her body went limp.

As she slumped to the floor I made a hasty diagnosis (or "wild guess"; take your pick!) and held my breath while I sprinted down the hall toward the back of the ground floor. As I reached an entrance to the kitchen, I yelled, "Red alert! Intruders! Possible gas attack!" I _didn't_ get woozy after I filled my lungs with air again, so I was probably outside the effective range of whatever had put Anarchy down for the count.

Big Abby (the Abominatrix) suddenly appeared in a nearby doorway. "Not _now_," she groused. "_Secret Hospital_ starts in ten minutes!" She advanced down the hall toward the front entrance. "Crud—well, maybe I can wrap this up before then."

"Not likely!" said a mean voice—out of thin air, near as I could tell. "You may not be She-Hulk, but you look close enough for government work. Eat this!" There was a sound like a very hard blow colliding with flesh and I actually saw Big Abby's head rock from an impact—although she stayed standing and briskly counterattacked with a roundhouse punch that abruptly stopped in midair. Then the same mean voice—female, but not ladylike—said, "Yo! Drop the scramble! I want her to look me in the eye when I pulverize her!"

Something flickered in mid-air, and suddenly I saw Big Abby was grappling with Titania, one of those villains Cap had once told me he felt particularly sorry for because of her psychological hang-ups . . . even though she could arm-wrestle with _She-Hulk_ and give that lady a real run for her money!

* * *

**Author's Note: **Most of you probably don't remember **Anarchy.** During "Acts of Vengeance" (the big Marvel event of late 1989) she worked for Flag-Smasher in an ULTIMATUM operation in New York City. Moon Knight and the Punisher teamed up to combat the operation. Anarchy gave them both a miserable time, but Moon Knight finally kayoed her—and then he blocked the Punisher's plan to shoot her in the head just to be on the safe side. So she should have survived that story, but as far as I can tell she's never been heard from since! Naturally I had to dust her off and bring her out of limbo for this serial in which Free Spirit (the incredibly obscure heroine) keeps bumping into a plethora of similarly obscure villainesses! 


	12. Chapter 12: Intruders

**Chapter Twelve: Intruders**

One thing was certain: I wasn't going _anywhere near_ Titania and the Abominatrix as they tussled. With their strength levels, either woman could crush my flesh into jam with a stray blow without even noticing I was there, much less deliberately trying to hurt me. Not to mention that something invisible (gas was still my best guess) had knocked Anarchy down in the first round of this invasion, and I didn't have a gas mask handy. And someone had been keeping Titania invisible until ten seconds ago; that wasn't one of her own powers. Besides, I had no stake in this—it wasn't my job to defend this building against intruders at risk of life and limb. My current plan, for want of a weaker word, was to make it into the stairwell near the kitchen and then try to get and stay away from the line of fire.

I had the door I wanted in sight when it flew open and Black Lotus leaped out of the stairwell. I flattened myself against one side of the corridor to make room for her to get past me, and she started down the hall, obviously heading for the sounds of violence at the front of the house—when suddenly a woman came around a corner behind Black Lotus and a long whip cracked through the air and wrapped itself around Lotus's left leg. The attacker pulled it back, hard, jerking the leg out from under her victim. Black Lotus fell on the floor, then rolled to try to face her opponent, but was definitely at a disadvantage for the moment.

The woman with the whip was wearing a dark leather outfit. It included long gloves and also covered the bare essentials of her anatomy—but not much else. She would have looked right at home in a circus, calling herself a lion-tamer. Blond hair and fair skin and a nasty gleam in her eye. I had no idea who she was. I instinctively rejected the idea of saying to her: _Excuse me, ma'am, this fight is really none of my concern, may I just squeeze past you?_

Instead, I threw my laundry bag at her head. She threw up her left arm to block while her right hand maintained a tight grip on the handle of the whip which had immobilized Black Lotus, which gave me a brief window of opportunity in which both of her hands were occupied. I charged toward her, meaning to take advantage of the situation before the whip-lady was ready to fend me off. It helped that Black Lotus saw what I was doing and suddenly grabbed hold of the whip with both hands and yanked as hard as she could, pulling the blond attacker off-balance a bit. I got in close before the stranger had quite realized she needed to let go of the whip to deal with me, and by then it was too late for that to do her any good. My knifehand strike against the carotid scored a bullseye and her brain immediately took a nap. I let her slump against a wall and turned around.

"I did wonder, Esprit," Black Lotus said calmly as she unwrapped the thongs of the cat-o'-nine-tails from around her leg. "You didn't even resist my wristlock last night—but later, when we were in decent lighting, I saw you moving with _perfect_ balance. Which could have been a legacy of years of ballet lessons or some such, but I doubted it."

"There was nothing to fight about, so I didn't even want to try," I said meekly. "Besides, you're a professional—you'd probably mop the floor with me." I didn't know if that was true, but it seemed tactful to say so.

"Sensible. Pardon me; duty calls." Black Lotus was free now and gliding down the corridor again toward the area where the violent noises were still sounding.

"Wait!" I cried suddenly. "Watch out for knockout gas!" By the time I got those last words out, Black Lotus was around a corner and out of sight; I hoped she had heard me, but didn't know if the warning would do any good. The noise suggested any knockout gas lingering in the air hadn't stopped Big Abby yet . . . but she looked like an uglier version of the She-Hulk, whereas I thought Black Lotus was just regular flesh and blood.

I snatched up the laundry bag with my costume inside and reverted to my original plan: Get into the stairwell and skedaddle to another floor. Black Lotus would just have to fend for herself. I briefly debated whether to go up or down; finally settled on up. If holes got knocked in the floor, people in the basement might get buried. But I didn't really think the whole building would go tumbling down—and Zaladane's office was on the third floor. In the heat of the moment, I might be able to get into it unobserved and find something important—a document, a disk, something!

It was a nice plan. Naturally it got derailed by other events. Everything went white and stayed that way. Have you ever found yourself abruptly drowning in a huge vat of milk? Me neither, but that's the best I can do to describe the visual sensation of suddenly being surrounded by impenetrable whiteness in all directions. I literally couldn't see my hand in front of my face. I could still breathe normally, though, so it didn't seem to be a thick fog of an aerosol weapon. I figured it out after a few seconds, when I calmed down a little.

_Whiteout's power. She must be somewhere on the ground floor. Or in the building, anyway—just what is her range? Doesn't matter. Either she didn't realize I was nearby, or else she doesn't trust me enough to leave my vision alone._

There was a fresh round of yells from elsewhere in the building, but none from anyone close enough to be an immediate worry for me. I didn't move an inch until I had double-checked my memory of the last things I had seen. The way I'd been facing when it happened, the stairwell door should still be ahead of me and a little to the left . . .

I reached out slowly until I found a wall, and then drifted left until my fingertips found the doorframe, and then the knob. So far, so good. I eased the door open and slid into the stairwell. I took two steps uphill and then heard heavy footsteps thundering from above, coming in my direction—I threw away my old plan and headed down toward the basement. Whoever was descending, I didn't want to try to wriggle past them when I was blind—and maybe they were too? I left the door open behind me and tried to combine speed and stealth as I scurried down toward the basement. I made it without tripping.

I found the door at the bottom of the stairwell, opened it, stepped through, and let it click shut behind me. All of a sudden my vision was back! I instantly formed at least two half-baked theories regarding why Whiteout's influence was no longer affecting me, and then shelved the question for later consideration. I prowled around the main room of the basement and decided I was the only one here. Possibly Lotus had been on guard duty until she heard the commotion above? Reed Richards might have been able to figure out how to use Cathode's equipment to do something fiendishly clever in the next ten seconds, but I was no Reed Richards. Belatedly, it occurred to me that it was better than even money that the intruders' target was some or all of the stuff Cathode and Zaladane had down here. I started looking for hiding places. The best I could do was the room at the far end that contained the generators for the household power grid. I stepped in, left that door open, and found I could monitor events in the main room by peering through a tiny crack between the hinged edge of the door and the jamb.

A minute or two went by. Then the stairwell door opened and the two women who collectively ran things in this hideout rushed into the basement. Cathode was wearing a set of navy-blue pajamas—and, of course, the obligatory high-tech visor. I still didn't know what her eyes looked like. Zaladane was wearing a blood-red bathrobe and her hair was plastered to her head; I figured she'd been in the shower when the commotion on the ground floor began.

Zaladane said, "No sign of them down here—so how quickly can you get us out of here?"

Cathode moved to a control panel and began doing things very rapidly with both hands, even as she answered the question. "With all these jury-rigged connections and substitutions? Give me three minutes to warm everything up before it's safe enough to risk _our_ precious necks."

Zaladane's voice was impatient rather than apprehensive as she said, "Our enemies evidently sent several metahumans of their own; full capabilities unknown. Our minions will do their best, but I'm not convinced we _have_ three more minutes."

Humming noises began to emanate from various places, including a previously-silent generator a few feet from where I was standing. Cathode moved to another control panel and did more of whatever it was she needed to do. "Then we'll just have to see how far we can get," she said without bothering to look back at her partner. "If I tried to transmit you anywhere right now, you'd probably end up like those poor fools near the start of the first Star Trek movie."

Zaladane said in a tone of polite confusion, "Who?"

Cathode was frowning at some instruments now, but didn't seem really worried by whatever they were registering. "You never saw the movie? Transporter signals got scrambled somehow, and two people died screaming—partially disintegrated, I think. I promised myself I'd never let it happen to _me_."

"Then you were right!" said a woman's voice from the doorway to the stairwell. "You aren't teleporting _anywhere_ today, so you won't need to worry about signal degradation!"

I recognized her costume from a photo in a S.H.I.E.L.D. file about super-powered terrorist organizations. This appeared to be Phantazia, reportedly a member of one of the _several_ villainous groups that have each used the name "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants" at one time or another. . . .

* * *

**Author's Note:**

In Chapter Eleven, Free Spirit correctly identified Titania (Skeeter MacPherran) as one of the intruders, but didn't spot any others (although she knew there had to be others). In this installment, she's seen two more of the attackers (which still leaves some she hasn't seen). Here are quick comments on them:

The woman she recognized in the last paragraph is **Phantazia**, who debuted as a member of the version of "The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants" that Toad formed to fight X-Force in the early 90s (shortly after they quit calling themselves "the New Mutants"). Her powers allow her to manipulate a wide range of electromagnetic phenomena. This conveniently includes the ability to turn people invisible. This explains how a band of attackers got in through the front door without being seen immediately. 

The blond whip-lady whom Free Spirit didn't recognize at all is actually **Pavane,** who appeared several times in the old "Master of Kung Fu" series that was published in the 1970s and early 80s. Pavane was supposedly in voluntary "retirement" from the mercenary life when last seen in that old series—and near as I can tell, she has _never_ been seen or heard from since! I simply assume she was offered enough money—or got bored enough, or whatever—to make her come "out of retirement" long enough to participate in this assault on the brownstone.


	13. Chapter 13: Bluffing

**Chapter Thirteen: Bluffing**

Phantazia was the only invader in sight at the moment, but she might be bad enough all by herself. The S.H.I.E.L.D. dossier said she had some sort of wide-range ability to perceive and manipulate a wide range of, possibly all of, the electromagnetic spectrum. I wasn't too clear on just what the practical limits were to that ability, but I suspected she could affect anything and anyone in this basement if she cared to make the effort.

Zaladane waved a hand in a complex gesture and murmured two syllables that meant nothing to me—and then suddenly made a hacking noise and clutched at her throat.

"Don't do that again," Phantazia advised. "I can disrupt magical energies before you can focus them against me. One reason I was picked for this mission. Of course I've heard your sorcery is pretty low-level stuff compared to the heavy hitters in the field, but I'm taking no chances."

Cathode was still sitting at a control panel, but ostentatiously holding her hands very still. "If I sense any sort of weapons discharge or other scary thing happening, I'll make your own equipment fry you," Phantazia told her calmly.

"Understood," Cathode said in a neutral tone.

I had to make a decision. Was this really my problem, deserving my direct involvement? Probably, I decided. It was conceivable that Phantazia and her fellow attackers, if they seized control of the entire brownstone, would be willing to take my word for it that I was unimportant and just leave me locked up in a closet somewhere. But they might not—and I really didn't feel like surrendering. Making a good impression on the local partners in crime, Lady C and Lady Z, was worth taking some extra risks.

Even as I thought about it, I had moved quietly to the corner of this smaller room that was the furthest away from the door, and started changing clothes. For what I had in mind, the red-white-and-blue costume would be essential to making the right first impression. I was glad Cap had told me to practice the quick-change act every day until I had it down to a fine art; I didn't want to give Phantazia's friends too much time to catch up with her.

Phantazia was still talking as I crept back to the door and peered through the crack. She was saying something to Cathode about not activating any self-destruct mechanisms—or else. As I slowly opened the door, Cathode said, "Not to worry—I didn't bother installing any. We were working on a shoestring budget, compared to what I'm used to, and I didn't need to introduce any extra point failure sources on top of the glitches I expected to get without trying!"

Phantazia was facing in my general direction—so trying to sneak up on her from behind was not viable. In that case, I'd better try to create the impression that I had so much panache that I wasn't even interested in trying to sneak up on a superpowered mutant. (If only!) But as Cap would say: Never let them see you sweat.

I was in my Free Spirit outfit (not that Phantazia would recognize it) and even carrying the policeman's nightstick I had been carrying since yesterday afternoon. Earlier I had been hauling it around in my laundry bag. Now I used it to shove the door wide open as I stepped out into the main room of the basement. "Hello, Phantazia!" I said merrily. "I'll make this easy on you! Give up now. Better women than you have tried to block my power, and a fat lot of good it did them!"

"Then why aren't you already using it on me?" Phantazia wondered as I strolled a few steps closer (which still left about thirty feet between us).

"I want to get a little closer—and I want to give you a sporting chance. Bring it on!"

Phantazia scowled at me and presumably was setting up some sort of fancy electromagnetic distortion field in the air between us. I don't think she realized she was stepping forward as she focused on me—but I could see that Zaladane and Cathode noticed she'd find it harder to watch them as she approached me. Earlier, Phantazia had cowed them—or at least impeded them—with her fancy electromagnetic disruptions, but I didn't think her powers counted for much against a more solid attack than magic or electronic tricks.

If we could take her down before she realized she didn't need to shield herself against my mythical invisible superpowers—

Suddenly she snapped her fingers theatrically and my arms and legs locked up. Paralyzed, I guess—I'd never felt that way before. I was still breathing, but my limbs were not responding to anything I tried to do. I don't know exactly how she did that, but she must have been disrupting some of the normal functions of my metabolism—muscles, nerves, certain portions of the brain, I couldn't say which.

Phantazia started to say smugly, "Well, that was certainly a case of much ado about—" when a silvery blur in Cathode's hand impacted with the right side of her head and she flinched. Cathode drew back the wrench for a second blow just as my legs started taking orders again, and I stumbled forward as Zaladane pounced from behind, achieving a bar arm choke on Phantazia's throat.

I recovered my balance in time to help Cathode pummel Phantazia until we were all three sure that the cumulative attacks had truly knocked her out before she could refocus her concentration and turn the tide.

"I thank you, Esprit," Zaladane said in a formal tone. "It was looking awkward there—and more so if her friends came to reinforce her in the near future."

"Speaking of which . . . " I hinted, looking around at Cathode's huge teleportation rig, which filled up roughly one-third of the room, on my right.

"Just so. It could still happen, so why linger, awaiting them? Cathode, how close is your contraption to 'adequately safe' functionality?"

Cathode was back at the same control panel she'd been using when Phantazia entered, touching things and studying displays again. "Phantazia apparently didn't bother interfering with the warming-up process, since it wasn't doing anything to threaten her. Scoot over there, both of you!" She pointed to a spot against the wall to the left, several feet away from the big metal casing she'd teleported in last night (the job which had somehow triggered a local blackout).

We scooted!

"Be with you in a moment," Cathode said, pulling a CD out of a breast pocket of her pajamas and inserting it into a drive down near the floor.

Zaladane used the waiting time to ask me, "So, Esprit, do you really have any powers you thought might vex Phantazia?"

"No powers at all!" I said frankly. "A quick bluff to distract her was all I could think of."

"That was my assessment at the time," she said. _(Yeah, like she would really admit it if I had fooled her completely?)_ "Courageous, then, to 'draw her fire' in the gamble that my partner and I would be able to seize the advantage before it was too late for you."

"Not so courageous," I demurred. "Desperately rushed, perhaps. I didn't really think Phantazia and her friends were planning to go away soon and just leave me alone down here. Why wait for the situation to get any worse?"

Cathode had done whatever it was she had to do with the CD, and now jogged over to stand by us, saying helpfully: "And five, and four, and three, and two—"

—I saw someone—it looked like Titania—appearing in the stairwell door—

Cathode chanted: "And one, and—"

Suddenly the basement was gone and we were in a carpeted room with old-fashioned oak paneling on the walls!


	14. Chapter 14: Refuge

**Chapter Fourteen: Refuge**

"Move through there!" Cathode snapped, pointing to an open doorway in the wall to my right. I sprinted to it, on the theory she knew what she was talking about.

After I reached the next room and turned to look back, I saw Zaladane was making a point of following me much more slowly, scowling. I surmised she didn't care for hearing her ally's ideas phrased as brusque orders.

"Shake a leg, Z!" Cathode said as she slithered around her partner and then scrambled into the doorway as I jumped back out of the way. She turned and looked back over my shoulder. "First priority was saving us, but second priority was saving the fruit of our labors—the server from the Tempo. If no one tampers with the controls, it will be along very soon! Right where we materialized, only much bigger!" she finished, just in case Zaladane somehow had missed the point.

Zaladane was too dignified to scurry, exactly, but she did close the gap between us faster after that comment. She made it through the doorway with a good six seconds to spare before there was a shimmer in the room which quickly resolved itself into that huge steel casing from the basement of the brownstone. Cathode said in a gloating tone, "Yes! We're still in business!"

Zaladane seemed to be ignoring that; continuing across this second room as twisting her head back and forth as if searching for something. I played straight woman, feeding Cathode a line to let her gloat some more if she liked. "Any chance of the attackers following us the same way?"

"No," Cathode said smugly. "I installed some failsafe software from a CD-ROM right before we left. After a maximum of two automatic teleports, the whole system would be purged. They may capture the equipment, but they'll never know where the receiving room was for its last transmissions. Just getting it to work again at all would be a major undertaking."

"Meanwhile, where's Fugue and the rest of her band?" Zaladane was demanding from behind us.

I turned and studied the room we were now in. A couch was positioned so that people sitting on it could look through the open doorway into the "receiving room" where we'd arrived. On a coffee table in front of the couch, someone had left a cup of tea on a saucer, alongside a plateful of cookies and a couple of magazines. I touched the side of the cup. Pretty hot. The drinker must have stepped out just a few minutes ago. The window was shut; the only other way out was through an arch leading to a corridor. Outside the window, we appeared to have about thirty feet of clearing and then a dense collection of pine trees.

Cathode began to ask Zaladane something, but never finished phrasing the question; it probably became redundant as a very golden woman—my first impression—hurried into the room. "Sorry, Lady Z, Lady C," the new arrival said in a tone more perfunctory than penitent. She moved briskly toward the same doorway we had all come through and poked her head into the receiving room for a moment, asking as she did: "Any trouble expected? Hot pursuit, that sort of thing? If not, then welcome to your 'summer resort' in the taiga! The perfect place to get away from it all!"

"Thank you," said Zaladane in a tone that suggested a blizzard was rapidly approaching, several months before its proper season. "So nice to see you on the job, dear Fugue. It warms my heart no end, realizing that if some enemy had accessed this room first you would have been right there to ruin his day before he got any further." She paused significantly. "Just as I pay you to do."

Fugue made a sort of amused grimace. Not a look of consternation, as far as I could tell; more as if she were inviting her audience to laugh at how silly this fuss was. "Did it really matter whether I was in this room or another at the exact moment you arrived?" she inquired. "If he made it through two rooms before I saw him, he'd still have a miserable time thenceforth, eh?"

Her accent was very British. I thought she might be in her early twenties, but it was hard to tell. I wasn't even sure how much of what I was looking at was her "natural" appearance and how much was a costume, or body paint, or whatever.

I studied her more carefully now that she was standing still, turning around to let herself be framed in the doorway as she grinned at Zaladane. I saw Fugue wore a leotard made of some red material, with black horizontal stripes giving it a tiger-like effect. Her hips were bare, but from mid-thigh to over the knee, her legs were wrapped in strips of the same material as the leotard. Her skin was bright yellow, not a shade I had ever seen in the faces of any Asians I had met in the real world (nor even seen on television). Her features didn't look even remotely Far Eastern. Her hair—if it was really hair—was much the same shade of yellow as the flesh, and seemed organized into long, stiff rectangles which stuck up several inches above her head in front and stuck out in other directions on the sides and back. I supposed there might be some sort of gel or spray capable of giving that effect, but I didn't know for sure. (My usual idea of caring for my hair is to rub shampoo into it every morning, rinse it out, comb and dry it, and then largely forget it for the rest of the day.)

She also wore boots (as yellow as most of her appearance) which had other stiff rectangles sticking out horizontally at the sides, and for no apparent reason she had bracers on her forearms (same yellow as the flesh around them). Did she indulge in archery in her spare time?

The appearance of the boots made me wonder if her apparently-abnormal hair might actually be an elaborate headdress, vaguely reminiscent of an Indian chief in a Western wearing a bonnet with dozens of long feathers protruding. For that matter, I wasn't sure her skin was really such a vivid yellow. If I had cared to move in closer, I might have been able to resolve some of the questions in my mind—but I felt no need to interrupt her discussion with Zaladane.

Actually, the discussion had fallen on hard times while I was studying Fugue as best I could. Zaladane had not deigned to respond to Fugue's question, and the latter finally expanded upon her point by saying, "Give me a break, Lady Z. Sometimes a girl needs to go take something out of the microwave, or visit the powder room, you know?"

"The last time I checked," Zaladane said, "I was paying a weekly retainer for the exclusive services of Tektos, which supposedly had six members. Can't one of the other five cover for you during a break?"

Fugue said, "Bubble had the shift before me; she's asleep in the other house now. Tattoo is on a grocery run into the nearest town. Karbon and Shrapnel are out in the woods, practicing combat skills. Fractal . . . frankly, I never know where he goes when he disappears for awhile. He had the shift before Bubble, so he knows he's off the hook for awhile."

Cathode had seemed more amused than anything else, but now she spoke to Fugue for the first time. "I thought you were the leader of Tektos?"

"Of course I am," Fugue said with mock patience. "But you must remember that we were engineered for action, not passivity. If I tell the others to follow me into battle, they'll do it every time! But telling them to sit still and watch an empty room, day after day, while we wait for our absentee employer to find something more aggressive for us to do, is a much trickier proposition. I've been doing well, this past month, just making sure at least one person is standing watch in this building of yours at any given moment. Getting two at a time to do mind-numbingly monotonous eight-hour shifts in here, both twiddling our thumbs while our friends were having fun elsewhere, wasn't going to happen. If I tried to make it happen, I would cease to be 'leader' in short order!"

Zaladane said drily, "After you six 'superior' specimens of spliced human/alien DNA were unable to prevent those Genetix whelps from annihilating the Psight Corporation's headquarters in Switzerland, you found your old employers weren't so eager to pamper you as they had been before. You sounded grateful enough when I offered to hire the lot of you for 'mere' guard duty out in the backwoods, at—I say frankly—very generous wages."

"We had never had to worry about living on a tight budget before then," Fugue said agreeably. "A real eye-opener! And yes, we appreciated time to recuperate in a nice quiet spot after the drubbing we took in Switzerland! But now we're pawing at the ground looking for another fight; not just the chance to keep serving as glorified night watchmen!"

I was keeping my mouth firmly shut; I didn't know exactly what promises had been made between Zaladane and Tektos in the past, and had no interest in trying to play mediator between supervillains. Cathode, however, responded to that last bit, saying, "A pro-active role may be closer than you think, the way things have been going lately. Spread the word to your friends." This comment cut off Zaladane long enough for her to decide to sweep regally out of the room, despite still being in her bathrobe, instead of hanging around to argue some more with Fugue over whether or not it was a serious breach for Fugue to have been out of sight of the "receiving room" at the moment of our arrival.

Fugue, still grinning, watched her go and then eyed me carefully where I was standing against a wall and asked in a cheery tone, "Hello, Yankee-Girl! Flashy outfit! Are you on the payroll too?"

"They haven't offered me a paycheck," I said truthfully. "I never met either of those ladies until last night. I just happened to be staying in their house when some serious trouble started. Call me Esprit. I don't even know where I am now; I just want to go home as soon as possible." (I was straying from the strict truth toward the end of that speech, but my conscience wasn't fussing about it.)

Cathode had waited a bit and now left the room as well; possibly reluctant to appear to be treading on Zaladane's heels as part of her entourage. We had this room to ourselves. Fugue asked lazily, "Where is home?"

"Nowadays it's New York City," I said. "Been living there for a couple of years."

"Well, Fractal might be able to help you get back," Fugue said thoughtfully. "He does a little teleporting of his own, you know."

"I didn't, actually. I'm afraid I never heard of your group—Tektos, was it?"

"Yes, we are, and yes, it's understandable you don't recognize our names. Gena-Sys preferred us for black ops; not bank robberies in broad daylight like some of those looneys in your city whom I'm always hearing about on the telly." She effectively ended the conversation by waving at the door to the corridor. "Meanwhile, why don't you get settled in? Find an empty room; there's plenty in this house; the gang and I live in the other one. I'm still supposed to be on watch here, so I'd best not wander off again or Lady Z will really be in a snit. I'll be glad to introduce you to Fractal when he pops up again, and the rest of my pals as well."

I took a hint and left her alone, though I suspected she just wanted to finish reading her magazines in peace.

* * *

**Author's Notes:**

In my neverending quest for Very Obscure Female Supervillains whom I may employ in this serial, I finally sunk to the depths of dusting off a few from the "Marvel UK" comics of the early 90s. The villainous team known as Tektos debuted in 1993 in a six-part miniseries called "Genetix." I read that mini ages ago and then largely forgot about Tektos until just recently (frankly, they didn't get too much in the way of "character development" in it). As far as I have been able to determine from online research, Fugue and her five teammates in Tektos have never been heard from again after they got beaten soundly in a fight in Switzerland at the end of that mini. That's just the sort of material I like to unearth and drag out into the light of day in this serial! As far as I'm concerned, while they were licking their wounds they ended up accepting a contract with Zaladane!


	15. Chapter 15: Fractal

**Chapter Fifteen: Fractal**

I left Fugue and explored the rest of the ground floor of the house. I saw Zaladane, still in her bathrobe, standing in a kitchen opening a can with an electric opener. I suddenly realized she probably hadn't even had any breakfast before the attack. When she ran down into the basement she'd appeared to be fresh from the shower. I didn't try to disturb her; I had eaten lunch—or most of a lunch—just before the fur started to fly at the brownstone.

Cathode, I didn't see at all. There were no bedrooms on the first floor, so Cathode was probably staking her claim to one upstairs. I decided it would be more interesting to explore the outdoors. I found the front door and stepped out onto a porch and then down the steps to the grass.

Now I could see that this secondary base of Zaladane's was a rectangle of cleared land in the midst of what appeared to be endless quantities of pine trees stretching away in all directions. Reminded me of some campsites in northern Minnesota. Near one end of the rectangle was the two-story house I had just vacated; a matching house stood about fifty yards away; their front doors facing each other. That other one must be the building which Tektos used for its own living quarters; this one being maintained for the use of Zaladane and her partner and anyone else who tagged along with them (I being a case in point). There was a dirt road emerging from the trees on the south; it divided then, with one branch curving around toward the rear of each house. No vehicles in sight. Someone called "Tattoo" was supposedly off on a shopping trip, I remembered. I started moving around the house I'd just left, studying the terrain more closely.

"Well, hello!" said a very odd voice from behind me, resembling something which might emanate from a voice synthesizer programmed to have a British flavor. "I thought the scenery in these woods was boring to anyone who doesn't love pine cones, but I should have had more faith! Where did you come from, cutie?"

I turned and studied the speaker, whom I would have sworn had not been anywhere near me a few seconds earlier. A year ago I would have screamed after one good look. But I'd broadened my horizons lately. Even so, the creature now in front of me was the oddest-looking entity who'd ever spoken to me—and I say that as one who had fought the Serpent Society, been rescued from them by Force Works, and later been introduced to several of Cap's fellow Avengers. It was bipedal in form, I thought, with two arms and two legs, but its outline was not that of any human I'd ever seen. The head, seemingly turned in profile, had a long muzzle, something like a crocodile's. The jaws were open, with three long fangs protruding down from the end of the upper jaw, and three fangs sticking up from the end of the lower. Each hand appeared to have just three long fingers (or possibly claws).

The oddest thing, though, was that the entity seemed to lack depth or distinctive features; it looked more like an outline of a strange creature, constantly covered with shifting combinations of black and dark red—not in solid blocks of color, but more like static on the screen of a TV tuned to the wrong channel. Then it turned its head to face me, and I suddenly saw two long yellow triangles that might be eyes. "Cat got your tongue?" it asked in the same voice I'd heard a moment ago. "My name's Fractal!"

Fractal? I blinked; I had trouble seeing the relevance of the name. Looking again at various parts of the entity's outline, I could not honestly say that its component parts resembled the whole. I didn't argue the point, though—mathematical jargon would be out of character for the shallow civilian I was trying to be. "Pleased to meet you," I said, doing my best to sound sincere in a slightly apprehensive sort of way. "Call me Esprit. I just popped in a few minutes ago with Cathode and Zaladane."

"Lady C and Lady Z?" Fractal seemed to pivot, as if checking every direction at once for any sign of its co-employers. Not finding them, it added, "Huh. Didn't expect more than a phone call from those two prima donnas any time soon. What is this, a surprise inspection?" I tentatively decided to assume Fractal was male, after the offhand reference to "prima donnas." I could be wrong, of course. There were no obvious gender-specific characteristics to judge by.

With that settled, I pondered for a moment. Would Cathode and Zaladane be really upset if I revealed to the hired help that the two of them had fled Manhattan in a terrible hurry as a task force of other supervillains was taking the brownstone by storm? Thus the teleportation to this out-of-the-way spot, wherever it was? They might feel it weakened their images with the mercenaries of Tektos, but I decided to risk it; neither partner had specifically told me to keep my lip zipped and I could always point out I didn't work for their organization anyway.

"No, I think it's more of a case of 'any port in a storm,'" I said as I made my decision. I gave Fractal a brief rundown of recent events in the brownstone, explaining that I was not a newly hired "co-worker" of his, but merely a temporary "guest" who had been lucky enough to be invited to come along for the ride when Cathode fired up her massive teleportation device. (Naturally I left out anything it didn't need to know, such as my being one of Captain America's apprentices.)

"One will get you ten Lady C's going to be awfully cranky about losing her hand-built teleporter," Fractal mused as I finished. "She doesn't have another one stashed here for emergencies, I can tell you that for sure! Of course there are other ways to get little jobs done," he added. "I can teleport myself and my friends if need be, but you'll never see me stealing the entire Statue of Liberty that way!"

Fugue had said something about his abilities, but I chose to play dumb. I widened my eyes and said in a breathless tone, "Really? I never knew anybody who had that kind of superpower before! Is it very hard to do?" (I wished I knew more about flirting—if Fractal was susceptible to it, which was still dubious. I basically spent my high school years being ignored by the boys and too shy to really try to change that.)

"Eh, it just comes naturally to me," he said in a different tone which I strongly suspected was meant to be a show of modesty. He appeared to snap his fingers (I think—it was hard to tell) and suddenly he was standing three feet to my right, then crouching ten feet to my left, then materialized about thirty feet above the ground for a split-second, waving to me before he vanished in a flash and suddenly stood just in front of me again.

"Simplest thing in the world, when I'm in the mood to travel fast. Has to do with the alien DNA mixed in with the other stuff, you know."

I decided that was supposed to shock me, so I folded my arms protectively in front of my chest and stepped back a pace, thinking nervous thoughts.

Fractal made a sound I presumed was a digitized snort. "Don't worry, cutie—I haven't got any cannibal in me. I never met any of the aliens whose DNA they used in the lab, but I don't think my ancestors on that side would see you as a tasty meat snack."

I didn't unfold my arms, but I didn't keep backing away, either. "Terrific. What do you eat, then?"

"Practically anything I please," he said with his jaws wide open in what might have been his version of a grin (to give him the full benefit of the doubt). "My digestion is funny that way. If you ever invite me over for dinner, don't worry about pandering to my allergies! Just feed me whatever you've got left over and tell me it's a medley of Chinese cuisine or something! I won't know the difference!"

I let myself smile fleetingly. "That's very reassuring. I might even take you up on it sometime. But first I was wondering if you could do something else for me . . ."

"Let me hear it, then."

I was starting to form some opinions about Fractal. Unlike many of the villains I had met, he had very little chance of being able to pull on some nice clothes, stroll into a bar, and strike up an acquaintance with the person on the next stool while being treated as a "normal" person. From what Fugue and Zaladane had said to each other when we arrived, I gathered the six members of Tektos had been sitting out here in the woods, guarding this remote location, for quite some time. Months, I inferred. With very little to break the monotony?

Fractal almost certainly had not had any conversations with new faces in all that time. And I didn't know how wide his social circle had been before Tektos left (or was fired by?) its old employers and accepted this job, either. By now he must know all the personality quirks of his teammates backwards and forwards, and they probably were well-accustomed to his stunts and conversational gambits, as well. Although it was unsettling to think of myself this way, just seeing me might have been the most exciting thing that had happened to him in a good many weeks! My failure to scream and run away after the first glimpse of him probably struck him as a very encouraging sign that he could find a new and hopefully appreciative audience as he talked about himself. I tentatively began thinking of him as having the limited social skills of a little boy who feels he isn't getting his "fair share" of attention.

While I organized my thoughts on that subject, I was already saying, "Well, my being here is really more of an accident than anything else. I don't even know what country I'm in!"

"Canada," he said, either trying to be helpful or else relishing the opportunity to be a know-it-all (the jury was still out on that one).

"Thanks, that really narrows it down," I said drily. "Isn't Canada, like, the second-largest country on Earth? But what I meant was, if someone could give me a lift back home to the Big Apple, I wouldn't be a 'security risk' to this base of yours because I don't have a clue how to find it on the map! All I've seen is pine trees and more pine trees!"

"Big Apple," he repeated. "That's one of your Yank nicknames for New York City, right?"

I nodded.

"Never seen the sights there," he reflected. "Always meant to, someday. But it's thousands of kilometers from here. I couldn't do it all in one hop, even if I knew the terrain by heart. Could easily give you a lift to the nearest town with an airstrip or train station, though."

I shook my head. "No good—I'm not carrying money to pay for a ticket. Like I said, I wasn't planning to leave town in the first place!"

He did something very elaborate that I think was meant as a friendly shrug. "Well, cutie, I suppose I could carry you all the way there if you really wanted it that way, but it would take a while—lots of little jumps—and I don't think I should unless Lady Z and Lady C give it their blessing."

I hadn't really expected him to say anything else in the end, but the hope had been there. If I could find a safe way to report to the Avengers or S.H.I.E.L.D., I was ready to do so. Let them worry about cracking down on whatever scheme was afoot!

I did my best to give the impression of a girl shaking off a mild disappointment. I smiled at him. "Well, I'll be sure to ask when I get the chance, then! But I don't think they'd love me for disturbing them right now. They'll probably call a meeting sometime soon. Until then, what do you do for fun around here?"


	16. Chapter 16: Lackeys

**Chapter Sixteen: Lackeys**

I figured we were two time zones west of Manhattan; the sun had moved to the east considerably when we made our jump to here. Fractal had said we were in Canada, which didn't exactly narrow it down much. He didn't feel the need to tell me anything more; I gathered this location was supposed to stay strictly secret and he wasn't sure I had any need-to-know.

Fractal and I had spent a few hours shooting pool in the basement of what he called the Tektos House. (The building which Zaladane and Cathode reserved for their own use was called the Boss House.) He won most of the games, and for good measure, I did my best to giggle at most of his jokes, even the rather bloodthirsty ones. Then we came back to the other house and walked into the middle of an argument between Fugue and Zaladane. Near as I could reconstruct the situation, Zaladane must've had a lengthy talk with Fugue about one thing and another, and then the subject had drifted to immediate dinner plans. Zaladane's initial assumption, apparently announced just before I got within earshot, had been that someone from Tektos would whip up dinner for the two bosses and then serve it to them in their private chambers on the second floor of this house.

Fugue begged to differ. I heard some of this as I moved through the house, looking for the scene of the verbal battle. By the time I poked my head in through a doorway, Zaladane was snapping: "We hired you, we paid you, and we expect the proper respect from you!" Her lovely features were contorted as she pointed an accusing finger at the leader of this hired band of mercenaries.

Unfazed, Fugue was sneering right back at her. "Our contract called for us to keep this place secure—which it is—and to be ready to fight at short notice—which we are. Nothing was said about becoming your domestic servants whenever you . . . graced us . . . with your presence. Are you proposing to pay us extra for that sort of nonsense?"

This was not a tight-knit group. Well, I'd only met two Tektos members out of six, so far; maybe they were very tight with each other; but they sure didn't show Zaladane the deference she regarded as her due. Hadn't been properly conditioned, I supposed. Such a scene back in my parents' house would have been unthinkable—when Mom and Dad handed out household chores, backtalk didn't get you very far and usually none of us kids even tried. (On the other hand, our parents didn't expect us to carry their meals upstairs to them on a regular basis . . .)

That led to another train of thought. If there had been an argument, say, between Dad and one of my brothers, Mom would have tried to play peacemaker. If Mom didn't happen to be around, I would have tried to pinch-hit for her. Of course, the rules were different in families than they were in criminal organizations showing serious igns of strain . . . still and all, I decided to stick my nose in where it probably wasn't wanted.

"Excuse me!" I said loudly. "I don't have any contract to argue about, but I worked in a restaurant once." (Part-time at a McBurgers franchise for awhile when I was a teenager—not the same thing as being a real waitress—but I saw no need to confuse the issue by spelling that out.) "As long as I'm stuck here, I'm willing to help out to earn my keep. I even know a little bit about cooking." (More than a little, actually, but no point in inflating anyone's expectations.) "I'd be glad to whip something up for Lady Z and Lady C and myself, and then carry it to them wherever they intend to dine."

Fugue jumped at this way to break the impasse. As she turned to look at me, the side of her face that was now away from Zaladane gave me a sudden wink. "If you want to wait on them hand and foot, Esprit, that's none of my concern. We of Tektos are much less formal about such matters, as long as there's hot food and plenty of it when we're feeling peckish!"

Zaladane was slower to react. She'd regained her composure during the breathing space she gained when I was doing the talking, and now her aristocratic poker face was back in business. "That is a kind thought on your part, Esprit," she said approvingly, "especially since—as you remind me—you are under no formal obligation to my partner and I. In fact, it occurs to me that after your excellent performance earlier today, in Manhattan, Cathode and I both ought to get to know you better. Suppose we three agree to break bread together in the dining room on this floor, perhaps two hours from now?" She waved a hand in the general direction of a room I'd noted earlier, which contained a long table and several chairs.

I deduced that offering me a seat at the royal table, while conspicuously omitting Fugue from the guest list, was meant to be taken as a signal honor for me and a harsh snub for Fugue at the same time, rewarding my cooperative attitude and punishing her recalcitrant one in the same breath. If so, it was not notably successful in either department—I didn't relish the thought of dining at Zaladane's table and Fugue either didn't care about being excluded or else was doing a fabulous job of concealing her disappointment. I knew better than to decline the "invitation," however.

Fugue winked at me again as she said, "Actually, I normally take charge of the kitchen in Tektos House at dinner time. Cooking for nine should not be too different from cooking for six; suppose I do all of that and then Esprit just carries your share of the stuff into your dining room?"

This could be taken, if you stretched your imagination a little, as a sign of "compromise"—backing down a bit from her previous refusal to provide domestic service for her co-employers. But if she cooked in Tektos House, that raised other questions. Zaladane apparently had her heart set on dining in regal isolation here at Boss House. Would she agree to relocate to a private room in Tektos House, or would she expect me to trot back and forth between the two houses, about fifty yards each way, to fetch and carry the hot food? I tried to find the most tactful way to phrase the question, but a kibitzer beat me to it.

"Suppose I play delivery boy, popping back and forth from one kitchen to the other?" Fractal suggested from just behind me. (I exaggerated a flinch to let him think I'd had no idea he was standing there.) "Save Esprit no end of trouble that way! I don't mind doing her a little favor!" His long jaws gaped in what was probably meant to be a friendly grin; I think he was in a very good mood after I'd let him beat me most of the time at the pool table and had meekly accepted his advice on how to handle the cue stick properly (he'd insisted upon calling it a "billiards cue" even though we hadn't been playing billiards).

Two hours later it was time to serve dinner. I had tossed a cloth over the long table and laid out three place settings with materials found in the kitchen drawers and cupboards of the Boss House. Then I found a magazine and waited for the hot food to arrive. When Fugue made his first delivery, I began to realize I would have been better off cooking from scratch. It appeared that Fugue's definition of "cooking for a household" was to heat up lots of canned food and frozen dinners in a microwave oven. I suppose I should have expected that.

My Mom only stooped to such methods in times of dire emergency, and judging by the buffet lunch I'd seen in their brownstone headquarters several hours earlier, Zaladane and Cathode didn't like that quick and simple approach either to putting hot food on the table either. On the plus side, it clearly wasn't my fault if the material—a pot of heated spaghetti, some hamburgers fresh from the freezer, some peaches and pineapple fresh from the cans, et cetera—wasn't up to their normal culinary standards.

I reminded myself it wasn't my responsibility to apologize for someone else's lazy "cooking" habits. I also told myself Zaladane wasn't likely to "shoot the messenger" who carried bad tidings (or hastily heated food instead of good old-fashioned homestyle cooking), and carried the first tray into the dining room.


	17. Chapter 17: Dinner

**Chapter Seventeen: Dinner**

Zaladane and Cathode must have previously stored spare clothes in this house for a rainy day; they looked much better at the dinner table than they had looked when we arrived

Zaladane and Cathode must have previously stored spare clothes in this house for a rainy day; they looked much better at the dinner table than they had looked when we arrived. Zaladane had been wearing a bathrobe when we teleported here, Cathode had been in pajamas, and I'd swear neither of them had been toting any luggage. Now Zaladane was wearing a dark blue jumpsuit which just shouted _chic_; I suspected it had cost as much as I would spend on clothes in a year. Cathode had gone for a humbler look—blue jeans and a long-sleeved checked shirt such as a stereotypical lumberjack might wear.

But I've known _real_ lumberjacks, and they don't generally wear clothes tailored to fit the customer almost like a second skin. Their work clothes don't usually look and smell _brand new_, either. Cathode didn't look like she was ready to run outside and chop down a black spruce; she looked like an actress dressed up to pose for a movie poster about some Hollywood mogul's romanticized version of the timber industry. (Except that the fancy electronic visor stretching across her upper face was incongruous—it would look perfect in a science fiction summer blockbuster, though.)

Zaladane had been much politer than I might've expected when I started bringing out the comestibles Fractal had carried from one kitchen to the other. Having seen the buffet lunch laid out for the occupants of her Manhattan brownstone earlier today, I knew she was accustomed to a higher standard of cuisine than frozen hamburgers and a potful of canned spaghetti-with-meatballs, all of which had been run through a microwave before being rushed to the table. The only dessert in sight was some fruit which was also fresh from the can, but hadn't been microwaved.

On the other hand, Zaladane knew I had offered to cook dinner for us and had been turned down. She didn't even say much about Fugue's quick-and-dirty approach to feeding people; without saying this in so many words, Zaladane conveyed the impression that a wise queen should know better than to expect any sophistication in the culinary efforts of untrained peasants such as Fugue and her fellow mercenaries of Tektos.

Cathode, on the other hand, didn't even seem to care. Of course that visor made it trickier to gauge her expressions, especially when her mouth was busy chewing, but she didn't say anything about the quality of the food and I really didn't get the impression that she was biting her tongue to hold back a few remarks, either. Less fussy about her cuisine? Or perhaps her expectations for North American cooking were already so low that she was prepared to settle for "reasonably nutritious" and leave it at that?

After the first couple of minutes, table talk began. They wanted to know things about me—or at least Zaladane did; she asked most of the questions. I had anticipated this and prepared a cover story which drew heavily upon my real background, so that I could fill in all sorts of details with authentic local color from my home town if need be, but with key names changed. I had no idea how proficient these two were at gauging American accents, but there was always the chance that one or the other could at least identify mine as the natural product of a childhood spent _somewhere_ in the area around Lake Superior and the headwaters of the Mississippi. So I claimed to be a native daughter of a small town in that region, one located seventy miles away from where my parents actually lived. If Zaladane or Cathode could analyze my pronunciation with such pinpoint accuracy as to be certain I was lying, I'd be flabbergasted. More importantly: If they, or their hirelings, ever went nosing around in the town I had mentioned, trying to find people who recognized my face and could point them toward my family . . . a fat lot of good it would do them.

I described dropping out of college (not quite what happened) and then moving to New York when an old friend of the family offered me a job in the chorus line of an off-Broadway musical (not even remotely true). The musical had recently finished its run and left me at loose ends, I said. In response to a question about my agility and fighting skills, I said I'd taken weekly lessons in both dancing and karate for years (not true, but in the last several months I had made up for lost time after my coordination and learning curve for new physical skills had both been maximized by Superia's treatments). They seemed to take my modified autobiography at face value without probing for such details as the name of my teacher in second grade.

"Any training with guns?" Cathode asked suddenly.

I shrugged. "Everyone in my family knows how to use a rifle or shotgun for hunting. I never wanted a job shooting at people, though. They might shoot back—more accurately. It just doesn't appeal."

Zaladane snorted. "That's what _men_ are for. Killing each other en masse when the need arises, or even when it doesn't. My old employer, the High Evolutionary, might say warfare began as a way to weed out the weaker, less aggressive males before they could do too much breeding, and incidentally keep the total population from growing too terribly fast. Then he'd point out that this system broke down in the last century or two, what with radical improvements in agriculture and medicine to skew the old equations.

"Or he might say something else entirely," she added as an afterthought. "He has been known to change his paradigms at odd intervals."

"Z," Cathode said tartly, "I think you're straying from the point. I asked about guns; Esprit said she knows how to use the long guns but doesn't want to do it for a living. Is there anything else she could do for us?"

Zaladane gave her partner an impatient look, then turned her attention back to me. "Thus far you have not shown signs of being overly concerned with blind obedience to the law of the land, Esprit. Would you be willing to work for us on lucrative terms, with gunplay specifically excluded from your normal duties?"

"What would I be doing, then?" I responded. "And how long would the job probably last? I hope you will forgive me for pointing out that your organization doesn't seem as large and successful today as it did yesterday."

Zaladane laughed shortly; Cathode just smirked. After a moment, Zaladane waved at Cathode, apparently yielding the floor to her.

"We lost some hired mercenaries and one convenient building, Esprit," Cathode said calmly. "We also lost a teleportation unit, and that is particularly annoying because I will need to build a new one sometime soon. But at least I know how. I keep sets of key components stockpiled in various places on four continents. And we both have more funds stashed away than you would probably believe. What we really need for the future is reliable pairs of hands, people who can follow orders without going into snits, people who can strike quickly when violence is required but don't drool at the thought of provoking a fight every day, people who have enough wisdom to stay calm when things don't go as desired . . . and since we met you, your performance in those areas has been rather encouraging.

"Our only immediate worry was that the invaders of the brownstone might be able to trace the teleport signal somehow. But if they were going to do it, we would have seen signs of them by now, and Tektos would have provided the first wave of attackers with some nasty surprises. We have all the time in the world to move our prize to another location and master its secrets."

"Secrets?" I decided that sounded too inquisitive, and backpedaled for the sake of appearances. "On second thought, never mind—it's none of my business what that big metal casing is. Frankly, I'll just be happy if you can point me in the direction of the Big Apple—maybe teleport me there—sometime in the next few days. The less I know about what you're doing after I split, the better for all of us, right?"

Zaladane laughed. "Worried about being kept under house arrest for a great deal longer than I originally stated? Your social life in Manhattan will suffer?"

"Or worse than that—dead men tell no tales, et cetera? As in _Treasure Island,_" Cathode said nostalgically. "Read it when I was a little girl. Stirring stuff. The backstory was that Captain Flint and six of his pirates had rowed ashore to bury the treasure hoard. Days later, Flint came back to the waiting ship _alone_. None of the _remaining_ crew knew where on the island the gold and silver were hidden. When Flint died, the first mate swiped the treasure map and ran away from his comrades, and the plot proceeded from there." She shook her head, and added in what was probably meant to be a reassuring tone: "But that doesn't apply here. We already have our hands on the treasure we wanted, and we don't much care who knows we have it, as long as they can't find us in a hurry. You don't know where we are now, do you?"

"Somewhere in Canada, well west of New York, and surrounded by pine trees," I said after I realized she was really expecting an answer. "That probably pins it down to what, a couple of million square miles?"

Cathode chuckled. "You see? We could turn you loose in a big city right now and let you give an interview to CNN, and you wouldn't really be any danger to us. We must assume that by now someone has noticed our theft from the Tempo or will do so at any moment, so even if we tell you what we purloined, it won't increase our risks particularly. But your question about the long-range security of any employment we might offer was an apt one. Z, do you want to tell her why we are still sitting pretty?"

"The fusion of magic and technology, Esprit," Zaladane said. "Using one to enhance the other has been ventured by Doctor Doom, Baron Brimstone, Yandroth, and diverse others, but Vincent Stevens recently took it to a new level during his meteoric career on Wall Street. Of course, he had a much _deeper_ knowledge of the mystic arts than any of the others I mentioned; he came by it naturally."

I probably looked blank; she waved that last comment away with one hand and said, "Never mind his origins—he's dead now, if he was ever truly alive. But the technomagickal fruits of his innovative research remain, albeit largely neglected by the man who now _pretends_ to be the aforementioned Vincent Stevens, master of the Tempo. When I learned about this, I knew that what I needed was a brilliant electrical engineer, who shared something of my worldview and could help me to penetrate the defenses of a sorcerer's office building from a safe distance. Cathode fit the bill admirably; our partnership rests upon the strongest possible foundations: Mutual dependence for mutual gain. Neither of us could easily master the supercomputer which Stevens so drastically modified for his own purposes, but together we can plumb its secrets, reverse-engineer the peculiarities of its software and mystic enhancements, and copy them for our own purposes. Once we have done that, my grip upon the Savage Land will be unshakeable, as it never was when I relied upon mere magnetism to shore up my throne . . . and if Cathode wishes to become ruler of her own homeland, I shall not stand in her way."

"Becoming the secret power behind the throne will be good enough for me," Cathode demurred in a slow, lazy tone. "I don't want my countrymen depositing _every_ foolish problem on my desk; I just want to be able to shape policy on the _handful_ of issues I actually _care_ about."

"In any event, that will be entirely up to you," Zaladane said graciously. "I have no interest in meddling with the internal affairs of the Land of the Rising Sun. But I will need people to handle routine dealings, financial and diplomatic, with the United States of America—and perhaps even the General Assembly of the United Nations, if only as a matter of form. Those 'developing countries' do like to think their votes really count for something, yes?"

I knew I must look startled; I made no effort to conceal it. Was she really offering to set me up as an Ambassador, or at least a Deputy Ambassador or some other significant diplomatic rank, expecting me to carry much of the load in handling routine business with America or other governments? Of course that would only happen _after_ Zaladane had thoroughly developed the potential of this "technomagicks" thing and used it to reinstate herself as Queen of the Savage Land, with a tight grip on the flow of the unique resource known as Anti-Metal or Antarctic Vibranium. But it was awfully short acquaintance on which to be offering me anything in her hypothetical diplomatic corps.

_On the other hand. . . ._

I took a fresh look at the situation, trying to see "Esprit" through Zaladane's eyes. I had some college education. I could stay calm under pressure. I could accept orders without snarling in reflexive defiance. I didn't have any superpowers to encourage delusions of grandeur. I wasn't wealthy, so I'd be dependent upon Zaladane's largesse to keep me living comfortably. I had grown up in the USA, so I ought to understand my countrymen a lot better than a native of the Savage Land was likely to manage. It was possible that these factors really did combine to put me way out in front of most of the other people Zaladane knew. . . .

My ruminations had gotten that far when I realized, perhaps later than I should have done, that Cathode was slumped in her chair, silent and possibly asleep—hard to tell when her eyes were invisible behind that visor. The last thing she said had been in a particularly lazy-sounding tone . . . or just sleepy?

"Lady Z," I said, and pointed toward Cathode . . . although my arm didn't move as quickly as it should have. My other hand still held the drinking glass; I tried to twist my wrist to splash ice water on my face . . . the shock of the chill might stir up some adrenaline . . . but the glass just slipped through my fingers and fell to the carpeted floor, not breaking, but falling over so that the water formed a puddle around my left foot.

Zaladane began waving one hand in the air and chanting something I couldn't make out . . . but it was as if she were trapped in slow motion. I managed to push myself back from the table a bit and then I wanted to rise from the chair, but my body seemed a lot heavier than usual . . .

The last thing I heard was Fugue's voice saying, in that smooth British accent, "Terribly sorry, ladies, but you see, we've been offered vastly superior terms by another combine . . . ."


	18. Chapter 18: Cellmates

**Chapter Eighteen: Cellmates**

I was lying on what felt like . . .

An air mattress? With a sheet or blanket on top of it? I opened my eyes. Since I was lying on my left side, all I saw was a concrete wall a foot away from my nose. That wasn't particularly informative.

I could have played dead for awhile, just to see if anyone said anything helpful when they thought I was still unconscious, but somehow I just wasn't in the mood. I rolled over and found myself sitting on the air mattress, facing Anarchy who was lying on her back on another air mattress. The room we were in had plain concrete floor, ceiling, and four walls. A metal door, closed and presumably locked. It even had a sink and a toilet. And one light bulb overhead. If there had been metal bars visible, it would have been something straight out of a prison movie.

"Hello, Esprit," Anarchy said politely. "I thought it best to let you sleep it off. Waking you up sooner would probably just mean mutual frustration as I tried to speak to someone still groggy from a drug." Someone had taken away Anarchy's visor, and I didn't see her assault rifle either, but they'd left her the rest of her black-and-white ULTIMATUM outfit. I was still wearing my patriotic costume, but the policeman's nightstick I'd been carrying since yesterday was nowhere in sight.

I tried to speak, made a croaking sound, and cleared my throat. On the second try, I did better. "Any idea where we are?"

Anarchy shook her head, her long red hair whipping around as she did. "I was unconscious when I came here, so I can't even guess how long the travel time was. I haven't been allowed to look out any windows. I woke up, lying on a table in another room with my hands and feet restrained, around the time they were testing me for superpowers. I don't have any. They herded me into this cell and locked the door. That may have been four hours ago, at a guess. Perhaps two hours later, they brought you in."

She paused to look at me, very intently. I considered looking "cowed" by shifting my gaze away from hers, then decided not to bother and just looked right back at her until she expressed whatever was on her mind.

After about half a minute, Anarchy said: "They seemed surprised that you didn't have any superpowers. I gather you knocked out two of the attackers?"

"Not exactly," I said frankly. "Not single-handed. I helped Black Lotus with the first one. Some lady in dark leather, carrying a whip. I don't know who she was, but I don't think she had any powers."

"And the second?"

"Phantazia, in the basement. I distracted her by talking tough, then Lady C hit her upside the head with a wrench. Then Lady Z and I piled on. Definitely a team effort, but maybe Phantazia woke up and thought I had stunned her all by myself; I wouldn't know."

"Ah," she said, looking satisfied. "That makes more sense. I wondered how you would have done so much better against our attackers than I did."

Was her pride hurt? I said, accurately enough, "The only reason I knew there was trouble was because I saw you collapse. So I turned tail and ran, yelling to anyone who'd listen. If I'd been closer to the door than you, I never would have known what hit me and you would have sounded the alarm."

"True enough," she said, and I could see her relax slightly as she realized I wasn't trying to gloat about having done "better" than she. (Like I really wanted to start out by antagonizing my new cellmate over a trifle? Well, I suppose some people would feel that doing it that way was more entertaining than just being polite.)

"By the way -- I still don't know what got you. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary -- did you ever find out?"

"Mist Mistress," Anarchy said in a very cold tone, staring past me. "Phantazia cloaked the attackers with invisibility, then Titania held the front door open while Mist Mistress emanated colorless knockout gas. I was the first to succumb. After that, I gather things got wild for a few minutes."

I thought I remembered the name from one of Cap's files, but played dumb. "Mist Mistress? What's her deal?"

"A member of the Resistants," Anarchy explained. "One of their newer recruits. The senior members used to be a Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and later changed that to Mutant Force, and now they are the core of the Resistants." She shook her head dismissively. "I don't know why anyone would want to join a group that can't even make a decision about its own name and then stick to it!"

"Who are they working for?" I asked. "The last couple of days, I've met so many costumed women that I really need to start keeping a scorecard."

Anarchy scowled. "They didn't say. I got the impression that their employer was not part of the strikeforce invading the brownstone. I suspect it's some sorcerer or sorceress, though. One of the ways they tested me for powers looked like a mutant detector such as SHIELD sometimes uses, but then they waved some sort of amulet over my body and nothing happened. I think it was supposed to glow if it detected magical abilities or enchanted equipment. Presumably you got the same treatment later, before they decided this room was adequate to confine us both."

I chewed on that. "So you think they're taking special precautions with anyone who has powers? Such as Poundcakes and Big Abby? And we're just incidental?"

"Exactly," Anarchy nodded. "Once they took away my rifle and your nightstick, and searched us for other weapons, they must have written us off as essentially harmless if kept under lock and key." Her eyes narrowed. "So we're obligated to teach them how wrong they are to ignore us just because we don't have superpowers, right? Let's talk about what we should do after we break out of this cell."

I rubbed my temples. Had she really just said what I thought she had just said?


	19. Chapter 19: Breakout

**Chapter Nineteen: Breakout**

"Wait a minute," I said firmly. "I suppose you work for Lady C and Lady Z—_but I don't!_ I tagged along with a friend who was carrying a message to them, and then they insisted I stay under their roof for a few days until they had finished up some project or other. Prevent security leaks, you know?"

Anarchy nodded, and I continued with my almost-honest summary: "Right before we got knocked out—drugged food, I think—they were starting to offer me a job. But the conversation didn't go any further. Frankly, it now looks like they won't be in a position to give me a paycheck any time soon."

"Not a paycheck," she objected. "I get cold cash, weekly. You don't think they want the establishment to have records of what they're doing and who they've hired to help, do you?"

_You mean_ whom _they've hired_, I carefully didn't say. "'Paycheck' was a figure of speech," I said patiently. "And you know perfectly well that wasn't the point!"

I thought that was the first time I had seen her smile. It wasn't a particularly _warm_ smile, but the corners of her mouth went up, so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. "Classic capitalism," she observed. "It's more practical than extreme patriotism, at any rate. With that get-up you're prancing around in, I keep expecting you to start singing _The Star-Spangled Banner_. A paean to bloody-minded nationalism, as I recall." She shuddered ostentatiously.

I wanted to ask if ULTIMATUM's bloody-minded _anti_-nationalism was really any great improvement over the fighting spirit which Francis Scott Key had described in his lyrics during the War of 1812, but decided not to bother. Instead: "It's a dancing outfit, not a political statement," I said, which was at least half-true.

(It had been a dancing outfit when my old roommate bought it, and Jennifer had no politics to speak of; she just thought that red-white-and-blue design would look _very_ good on her. Which it did! I borrowed it one night when I needed a disguise in a hurry. What I saw in the mirror was pleasantly surprising. And patriotic, of course. Later I bought the outfit from her.)

Anarchy brushed away my disclaimer with a sharp gesture. "Never mind. We have more immediate problems. _I'm_ planning to break out, whether you like it or not. The question is: Are you coming? Or do you want me to bind and gag you so you can claim you begged me not to take such risks?"

I thought about that as fast as I could. Letting her tie me up was out of the question; it took way too much on faith. (Not just _her_ "good intentions," but also those of anyone else who might come along and find me helpless.) I'd be more willing to take my chances on beating Anarchy in unarmed combat, but what would that accomplish? We'd still be stuck in this cell together; no telling how long! I wasn't all that afraid of whatever we might find elsewhere in this building after escaping the cell, but the real problem was that I wanted to maintain the _role_ of a self-centered party girl who lacked heroic impulses. What would motivate "Esprit," the person I was pretending to be? What would have motivated my former roommate, Jennifer?

Then I decided to turn the problem around. Let Anarchy find a motivation for me! I tossed the conversational ball back at her. "Before I decide, suppose you tell me what I have to gain by cooperating, that I can't get by just sitting here and _waiting_. I don't say I like being here, but I don't like the idea of getting shot in the back as I try to run for it, either. I don't really know anything; I suspect that sooner or later our captors will realize that and turn me loose somewhere, since there's nothing to be gained by killing me."

"Your faith in the rationality of your fellow human beings is most touching," Anarchy said drily. "How do you know they don't need a human sacrifice to be readily available at a certain hour of a certain night? Kept confined, but alive and healthy, until the proper moment? Perhaps that's all they think either of us is good for?"

I blinked. Then I realized the idea wasn't as far-fetched as I would have liked. There was definitely sorcery involved here, and Cap had once assured me that there was a lot more truth to the old stories about demonology and other dark magic than the typical American could easily believe in this day and age. The Avengers bumped into such things with depressing frequency, he'd said.

But then, anyone could _imagine_ worst-case scenarios. That didn't make them real. "Do you have any reason to think that's actually on their agenda?" I inquired suspiciously.

"No," she said candidly, "but that's just another way of saying I don't know their agenda _at all._ Do you have any reason to think they really plan to turn you loose after things are settled?"

I didn't cave in too easily. Anarchy wouldn't believe in my sincerity if I did—or so I had to assume. It took her another five minutes to "persuade" me to try a breakout, but since that was what I had really wanted all along, I didn't raise all the counterarguments which occurred to me. It probably wasn't the smartest thing for a prisoner to do, but if I could just get to a phone . . .

After she was satisfied that she had worn me down—or made me see reason, as she probably saw it—I asked about our first move in getting out of here.

The red-headed terrorist said, "One classic approach is to fake a suicide by hanging, or one of us could attempt to murder the other in a noisy brawl. Either way, if guards unlock the cell and charge in to stop things, that gives the prisoners a chance to attack them. It works better on conventional law enforcement officers, though, who worry about what the local media may say if prisoners keep perishing. I doubt our current captors would lose much sleep if one of us were apparently dying in this cell. So using a wire garrote is probably out of the question. And an explosion would be too noisy for Stage One. We'll take a different tack. Nice quiet acid; never leave home without it."

I didn't have to fake my amazed stare. "Wire garrote, a bomb, acid—they let you keep those things?"

"Typical elitist thinking from superpowered beings," Anarchy scoffed. "We have no powers, therefore we are no great threat to those who do. They took away the _obvious_ weapons—my rifle and knife—but they left me my uniform and didn't bother with a _real_ search. They would have flunked the training camp I attended."

Anarchy sat down on an air mattress and doffed one gleaming white boot, then the other. She began ripping something out of the linings. Soon she had two pale cylinders—they looked ceramic. (To evade metal detectors, perhaps?) She squinted at one and then the other, apparently convincing herself they were both still sealed.

"The acid is actually a binary compound," she explained. "If either container were to leak, the worst that could happen would be a rash on my foot. Mixing them is a different story."

She put her boots back on before doing anything else. Then she unscrewed the end of one cylinder to reveal a slender plastic thing that looked like an eyedropper. She pulled a handkerchief out of a pocket and inserted it into the narrow crack between metal door and metal jamb, just above the knob and lock. Then she started squeezing the liquid into that same crack, just above the handkerchief—I realized it was meant to act as a sponge to slow the descent of the liquids.

After a few squeezes, she handed me the first cylinder and untopped the second one to produce another eyedropper. She squeezed a rivulet of the second liquid into the same crack, then stepped back hastily.

After a few seconds, I was positive I heard a hissing sound, and even saw wisps of smoke coming from the area of the lock.

When the sound of the newly produced acid's activities subsided, suggesting most of it had now been neutralized, Anarchy tested the door, then applied second doses of both chemicals . . . being very careful not to get drops of either on her gloved hands . . . and a minute later the lock was ruined and we were free.

(Okay, "free" in the sense that we were still somewhere in the lair of an enemy force of unknown strength, but at least we were no longer trapped in a cell.)

No one had reacted to the acid's work, so I wasn't terribly surprised to see an empty chamber on the far side of the door. Our cell's door had been in the center of a line of five; two of the other four doors were still shut. I half-expected Anarchy to try to open the closed ones, but she muttered something about not having enough acid and then moved toward a desk against the far wall and began quietly searching through the drawers. Perhaps hoping to find a firearm or other weapon?

My hearing is sharper than it used to be—or perhaps my brain just does a better job of interpreting the sonic vibrations reaching my ears nowadays; I've never been _sure_ just how much of what Superia did to change me was purely mental. Be that as it may, I heard one person's footsteps coming down the passage before Anarchy detected anything, and thus I flattened myself beside the doorway and waited.

As he strode through the doorway I got a chokehold on him and hissed, "Stay quiet!" in his ear. Even as I did this, I had already recognized him—it was my putative ally of convenience, Fortescue the con man!


	20. Chapter 20: Reunion

**Chapter Twenty: Reunion**

I loosened my hold on his neck and allowed Fortescue to speak. He wasn't dumb enough to abuse the privilege by making too much noise. In fact, he carefully closed the door behind him, quite gently, before saying anything at all.

"Hello, Esprit," he said softly. "This area is supposed to be soundproof, but no need to test that too strenuously. I came here hoping to liberate you so we could coordinate our next move! Glad to see you're already out and about!"

I wished I could believe him. Fortescue was the sort of smooth liar who'd say anything that popped into his head to impress a girl (although in my case he ought to know that it was a lost cause).

"Friend of yours?" Anarchy inquired, equally softly.

"That's putting it a little strong," I demurred. "'Temporary ally' says it better." (And even that much was giving him considerable benefit of the doubt, but I preferred not to explain the details of how we'd met and later agreed to work together.)

"Ah. Much like you and I, then?" She nodded. "And just what resources does he bring to the table? Powers? Fighting skills?"

Fortescue looked bashful. "I'm not the warrior-hero type. Would you settle for wit and charm and a lot of practice at wriggling out of tight situations?"

"Sweet-talking con man," I translated. "Persuading women to trust him with their cash is a specialty."

Anarchy studied Fortescue as if he were something she ought to scrape off the sole of her boot.

"Mostly super-powered women who stole the money in the first place," Fortescue hastily clarified.

"Well, that's all right then," Anarchy said approvingly.

I blinked, but knew this was no time to try to analyze her version of ethics. "Call him Fortescue," I said. "I don't know what he's been up to, so let's give him a minute to fill us in."

Anarchy nodded.

Fortescue focused his considerable charm on her as he spoke, although he had enough sense not to waste time paying her compliments before getting down to the brass tacks of the situation. But his smiles and body language suggested he was delighted to be speaking to her at all.

Running one hand through his sandy hair in a boyish gesture which I suspected him of practicing in front of the mirror each night, he said: "The original attacking party included Pavane, Mist Mistress, Phantazia, Titania, and a couple I can't name. They've also got the Tektos on their side—six gene-spliced mercenaries of British extraction—"

Anarchy cut him short with a raised hand and a curt statement: "I've read about them."

Fortescue glanced at me. "And I gather you met them?"

"Some of them."

"Good enough—I won't bother describing them, then. Here's the really cute thing: Phantazia seems to be the field leader of the combined forces for the moment, but I still haven't seen their big boss. I don't even know the name; they just keep referring to 'the Boss.' I gather it's a woman who's made some big promises to her recruits, and that she's got some supernatural mojo going for her—mortal sorceress or something else entirely, how would I know? I don't think she's in this building, but her minions are communicating with her somehow. They were _very_ excited about retrieving that big chunk of hardware Zaladane and Cathode had spirited off to Canada, so I guess it's just as important to their unseen boss as it was to our erstwhile hostesses."

"Speaking of whom," Anarchy said as Fortescue paused for breath, "just what happened to Lady C and Lady Z? Are they still alive?"

Fortescue said reassuringly, "I gather no one actually died, on either side, in the invasion of the brownstone. Phantazia seemed rather proud of having taken everyone alive, with no significant casualties—although it seemed to me that she glossed over the point of why she herself was found unconscious in the basement after her friends had mopped up on the other floors and went looking for her. She just said someone must have blindsided her." He broke off to stare at me. "Esprit . . . are you smirking?"

"I don't know; am I? Anyway, it was Lady C who clocked Phantazia with a wrench; I had just distracted her for a minute to get her looking the wrong way."

"And a marvelous distraction you must have been," he murmured in a tone that might actually have appealed to me if I didn't think he had the soul of a maggot.

Instead, I steered the conversation in a more productive direction. "Why aren't you locked up with the rest of us?"

"I told them I was an emissary from Marie LaVeau, Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, and they decided not to treat me _too_ roughly. First they tested me for inherent powers or magical phenomena, or concealed telecommunications devices for that matter. Of course I don't have any. I think they asked Zaladane about me later, and she told them the same story, of course. Now Phantazia is basically keeping me around on the same terms Zaladane had offered us—discreet house arrest for another day or two, and then—she says—I'll be turned loose to describe this group's triumphs to my employer and sound her out about whether she wants to make a deal with them to get in on the ground floor."

Anarchy glanced at me. "_Is he_ the Voodoo Queen's hand-picked agent?"

I shrugged. "With him, I'm never quite sure what to believe." Actually both of us had accepted an assignment from the partnership of the Dreamqueen and Amora the Enchantress, but it was perfectly true that Fortescue was a smooth liar and I had no idea where his real _loyalties_ lay (if he even had any beyond shameless self-interest, which I doubted).

Perhaps my sincerity on that point was obvious to Anarchy; she just said, "Duly noted," and dropped the subject as she redirected her attention to Fortescue. "And just how did you get in here? Shouldn't there be a sentry somewhere about?"

He spread his hands and looked helpless. "You'd think so, wouldn't you? But I didn't see one outside the door. I think they have considerable faith in the power of their locks, and they aren't really a very disciplined bunch, not like a professional military outfit. Maybe none of them were willing to sit here doing nothing in particular for hours at a time?"

Anarchy looked disgusted, but seemed to believe his summary of the situation. I was inclined to agree, but couldn't help wondering if Fortescue had turned his coat and was now setting us up in some elaborate new scam. Hard to see what the point would be, though.

Fortescue reached inside his leather jacket and pulled out a piece of stiff wire. "There ought to be more prisoners behind those other locked doors. Give me a couple of minutes and you'll have reinforcements for whatever you're planning to do."

"Expert at picking locks?" Anarchy raised her eyebrows at me. "But you didn't list that as one of his assets?"

"He never mentioned it to me," I said simply.

"Must've slipped my mind," Fortescue murmured as he began probing and twisting in the first lock. "By the way, I'm pretty sure we're underground. Mist Mistress knocked me out back at the brownstone, but I was waking up by the time we arrived . . . wherever we are. They had a hood over my head before they let me out of the vehicle, but I remember walking down some stairs. Two flights, I think, but I could be wrong. Anyway, don't bother looking for a window on _this_ floor as an easy escape route."

Something clicked in the lock and he quickly stepped back from the door. He looked at Anarchy over his shoulder and asked, "Do you want to do the honors? Whoever is inside might recognize you as a friendly face."

Anarchy accepted that logic and strode forward to grasp the handle on the door.


	21. Chapter 21: Technomagick

**Chapter Twenty-One: Technomagick**

I watched the red-headed terrorist/mercenary twist the knob and kick the door open, then dive to one side just as something small and silvery flashed through the doorway at throat level. A moment later I heard the sound of a metal object striking a concrete wall, and then again as the projectile fell to the floor.

"Apologies, Anarchy," said Black Lotus's voice from inside the cell. "I was already releasing it before I recognized you."

"I knew something of the sort might happen," Anarchy said calmly as she rose to her feet. "But I chanced it—I'm not sure how good the soundproofing is in this area, so I didn't want to yell through a thick metal door to let you know who I was."

Black Lotus emerged from the cell, still wearing the flowing green thing she'd been wearing yesterday night (or possibly just another copy of it?). Anyway, it had various little tears and stains suggesting she'd gotten some rough treatment from the invaders of the brownstone base. There was also a bruise on the left side of her jaw, but she seemed quite composed as she said, "You could have knocked in Morse code, though."

"Didn't know who was in there, and didn't even realize you _knew_ Morse," Anarchy said with a bare trace of apology in her tone. "Few people worry about studying such slow signaling methods in today's world of computers and cell phones."

Without showing any change of expression, Black Lotus somehow _radiated_ a sense of quiet reproof as she said gently, "Not all of us grew up in lands where the modern toys were so plentiful as they are in New York. And sometimes one wishes to send a _silent_ message without drawing attention. Via eyeblinks, for instance."

"True enough," Anarchy agreed. "The beauty of Morse is that it's so flexible."

Black Lotus moved across the room to where her projectile had landed on the floor. After it had stopped moving, I'd been able to see it was a smallish _shuriken._

"One question," I said, doing my best to sound humble. "Anarchy said they searched her for weapons. They missed a couple of things—mostly small, nonmetallic items, I gather—but how did they miss this? Where did you hide it?"

Black Lotus seemed amused. "If you don't know that trick, I'm not going to enlighten you today. I don't know you well enough."

I did my best to conjure up a rueful smile to show I wasn't offended. Meanwhile, Fortescue had been working on the last closed door in the line of five in one wall. Now something clicked and he stepped sideways, saying softly, "So how do you ladies want to announce yourselves to whoever is inside this one?"

Since Black Lotus had gently criticized Anarchy's method—even while giving an 'apology' for the shuriken at the same time—she realized as quickly as the rest of us that she needed to give us a demonstration of her preferred approach. No one said anything as she glided forward and rapped on the door with the heel of her left hand. It took me a few seconds to decide she was signaling in English but using _International_ Morse, instead of the earlier Morse code developed in the United States; then I was able to translate in my head.

BLACK LOTUS. STAY CALM.

Having done that, she twisted the handle and shoved the door open.

The result was sheer anticlimax. Yvonne, the dusky-skinned maid I'd met at the poker table the night before, was in the room. So was a fat woman with bleached blonde hair and an apron over her dress. A stranger to me, but I quickly gathered she was called "Mrs. Jarroway" and she was the household cook in the Zaladane/Cathode headquarters; no superpowers, no costume, and apparently no fighting skills. Neither of them had tried to do anything violent as the door swung open. Black Lotus and Anarchy were reasonably polite as they spoke to their employers' domestics for a few minutes to learn any scraps of information the two might have gleaned, but I could tell they didn't expect these two to take an active role in the breakout from wherever-the-heck we were.

Yvonne and Mrs. Jarroway didn't add much to our store of knowledge. Fortescue added some more. He knew that any superpowered agents of the Zaladane/Cathode partnership were being kept under special restraints in a room which he had not been permitted to enter. He had heard talk about the two partners being interrogated; he claimed that they had recently finished with Cathode—at least for today—and shoved her into a separate room. He borrowed the shuriken from Black Lotus and scratched a crude map.

"One guard outside the door," he said. "When I strolled past, it was Pavane. Blond lady with a whip; no powers—I think."

"Ah, her," Black Lotus said reminiscently. "Not a serious problem. And that's just down this corridor and around a corner to the left?"

Fortescue nodded. "I kinda got the impression they don't think they have any further use for Cathode, but are just keeping her isolated on general principle. I don't think Pavane seriously expects any trouble to break the monotony of her guard duty. Titania, down at the other end of this level, is probably more serious about her duty, but she shouldn't be able to see anything happening to Pavane. Nor hear it, if it's quick and quiet."

Black Lotus asked, "How's the footing out there?"

Fortescue looked blank. She prompted: "Carpet, hardwood, concrete? Clean, messy? Safe for bare feet?"

"Concrete in the corridors; concrete in the rooms," he said. "Just like in here. There are a few rugs, but none in the corridors. They do seem to keep the floors swept clean, near as I can tell. No broken glass, nothing like that."

Black Lotus balanced gracefully on her right leg while removing a sandal with a thick wooden heel from her left foot. When that was done, she switched legs and repeated the process. Barefoot, she glided silently across the room to the door connecting to the corridor, then paused before opening it.

"I signed a contract with Cathode. If I can do anything alone out there, I should be able to do it quietly and within ten minutes," she said, looking at Anarchy but really speaking to all of us. "If you hear loud noises, I was probably intercepted. If all is quiet, but I don't come back in ten minutes, then you must assume I'm somehow immobilized, perhaps unconscious or merely hiding in a closet to avoid detection . . . and then you will just have to use your own judgment in trying something else."

"Ten minutes," Anarchy agreed after a few seconds' thought. "All right—we'll sit tight for that long; doing our best to not draw attention."

Black Lotus nodded and eased the door open, then slipped out into the corridor, leaving the door ajar just a tad—presumably so we'd be sure to hear any screams, gunshots, or other signs of unpleasantness on this level. What we would do if we heard them was up in the air. Anarchy had suggested she had a bomb concealed on her person, but I didn't know any specifics about how powerful it was . . .

It didn't come to that. I was counting my heartbeats in an attempt to keep track of time. I estimated it had been six minutes and forty-five seconds (give or take a few seconds) when the door eased open and Black Lotus entered, moving as quietly as before, but this time she had Cathode over her shoulders in a fireman's carry. Cathode probably weighed at least as much as Black Lotus did; I was a bit surprised Lotus had that much upper-body strength. Her arms looked so slender . . . of course, mine didn't exactly bulge like a champion weightlifter's either, but I probably could have carried Cathode a fair distance myself. Perhaps Lotus had a special training regimen which had similar efficiency to Superia's exotic techniques for maximizing the power of mind over matter?

Anarchy and I moved forward and grabbed Cathode to lower her to the floor; Anarchy taking the shoulders and I the legs. Black Lotus hadn't asked for help with her burden, but she sure didn't object when she got it anyway. Cathode was still wearing the lumberjack-style clothes in which I'd last seen her.

It turned out Cathode was conscious, although too weak to stand. I hadn't realized at first because she'd been hanging limp over Lotus and keeping her eyes closed. (Presumably because she figured squirming around wouldn't make things any easier for her bearer.)

"Drugs," Black Lotus said, pointing to a fresh needle-mark on Cathode's forearm. "One of the more potent and experimental 'truth serums,' I gather; and perhaps a few other things to keep her listless. The lady still feels weak and uncoordinated."

"But I can talk," Cathode said faintly. "You all need to know things. I don't know who our captors are working for—someone female, I gather—but since they already know _everything_ Z and I have been doing lately, there's no point in keeping it secret from the rest of _you._ And some stray bit of information might turn out to be vital in planning tactics, for all I know."

"Some time ago I became aware that a man called Vincent Stephens had been soliciting funds from the leaders of various organized crime outfits in New York City. Although the details of what he told each leader seemed to differ, my sources agreed that he was offering each investor a chance to get in on the ground floor of something frightfully innovative in computers. I became curious and tried to steal one of his modified computers from his office building, the Tempo, with my teleportation rays.

"I failed. The ray was blocked by something I could only describe as a _very odd_ force field. It was extremely difficult to measure what was going on; which made me suspect the force field included energies from outside the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. That made me think of magic, and I finally happened to make contact with Zaladane, who was laying low after being reported dead in Antarctica. I think perhaps she really was dead for awhile—she refuses to speak of the details.

"At my urging, Zaladane arranged to visit a large party at which Vincent Stephens was also present. She watched him carefully, without speaking to him, and was struck by his resemblance to Stephen Strange, whom she says is the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth Dimension. But Vincent seemed totally lacking in the 'professional ethics' of the original. Z determined he had considerable mystic potential which he routinely used to override people's free will. She says such things happen more often than the typical civilian would believe, but usually the perpetrators are caught and chastised by Dr. Strange or other 'high-minded' sorcerers who frown on such heavy-handed use of power for personal gratification.

"We studied him further, and learned various interesting things. We were trying to decide whether a joint venture against the defenses around the Tempo was likely to be worth the risk of enraging a powerful wizard who might even be the Sorcerer Supreme. We didn't know exactly what he was doing with his equipment, so we kept holding off on that. Then the situation changed recently.

"Vincent Stevens is no longer alive. If he ever was—Z thinks he was some sort of magical construct; a hollow copy of Stephen Strange, now somehow dissolved. This created a better window of opportunity. As far as we could tell, the Sorcerer Supreme was taking very little interest in The Tempo, although it still was surrounded by powerful mystic wards which Vincent had set up to keep any half-competent mystic, psychic, or supernatural entity from intruding on a whim.

"So we put our contingency plan into action. The raw power of my teleportation ray never could have punched through the Tempo's wards—partly because of different 'wavelengths' involved, shall we say? And partly because if the defenses adjusted to block the energy of my ray, I wouldn't be able to 'see' how the magical field was shifting soon enough to compensate. Z could see it plainly, though, and cast spells to help counteract whatever the standing spells were automatically doing in their master's absence.

"Now I think our attackers must have known exactly what we were up to, and preferred to sit back and let us do the heavy lifting before they moved in and seized the spoils—one of Vincent Stephens's technomagick servers—for their own purposes. There's no honor among thieves nowadays," Cathode added dryly.

There was a long pause while everyone in her audience tried to digest all this. After a while, I inquired: "What are their purposes? Trying to dominate the computer industry with an unfair magical advantage, if they can mass-produce whatever this Vincent Stephens had done that was so special?"

Cathode shook her head, her long dark hair swinging wildly. "No, I'd say their ambitions go in a different direction. They asked me several questions about using teleportation technology to penetrate _dimensional_ barriers. They also wondered about using the stolen technomagick server to help sift through different planes of existence in search of a particular target to then be retrieved by teleportation. I wasn't much help, I'm afraid," she added with an obvious lack of regret. "I just told them I'd never messed around with that sort of thing and wouldn't know where to begin. This old reality of ours is quite enough for me, without opening a can of worms by digging around in other odd corners of the multiverse hoping to strike gold . . ."

Anarchy said, "So they want to go treasure-hunting in the Worlds of If?"

"Or _people_-hunting," Fortescue said suddenly. "I've heard them talk about their Boss as if they're in occasional contact with her, but never meet her in person. What if she's stuck in some far-off reality and knows how to _call_ home, but not how to _come_ home? So she's making extravagant promises for how she will reward those who bring her back?"

Cathode nodded agreeably. "That would fit. They didn't say exactly that in my hearing, but it would certainly fit. I gather they already have some teleportation tech of their own, so they weren't counting on capturing my devices intact for whatever was on their agenda."

Black Lotus said to Cathode: "You are still my employer. What is the priority? To extricate ourselves from this underground lair as quickly as possible, or to assist your partner, or something else?"

* * *

**Author's Note: **Much of Cathode's lecture about **Vincent Stephens** and his building of "technomagick" servers in the Tempo, in an effort to do grandiose things which he couldn't do just by waving his hand and muttering a spell, refers to things which "really happened" in the Marvel Universe around 1993-1995, during David Quinn's run as writer on the "Doctor Strange" title of that era. Also there was a little follow-up to those matters in stories by a couple of subsequent writers who worked on that same series before it was cancelled, but I don't believe the real Doctor Strange ever took any special interest in the modified servers in the office building, although in the next-to-last issue of the series he _vaguel_y _mentioned_ plans to have the entire building demolished just to be on the safe side. (I don't think we know if it ever_ was_ demolished, come to think of it—we only know that he once said it _would_ be!) I merely assume that Cathode and Zaladane were watching from the sidelines and that they managed to steal one of the many "technomagick" servers somewhere along the way, without Doctor Strange immediately becoming aware of it. (He had an awful lot of other things on his mind in that era).


	22. Chapter 22: Masquerade?

**Chapter Twenty-Two: Masquerade?**

"I don't see any gas masks among us," Cathode said. "And none of you have powers to offset our enemies'. Mist Mistress could turn into chloroform or (tear gas) or even cyanide, and take you all down. Titania could shrug off your worst blows. Shrapnel could explode in your faces. And so forth. The prudent course is to retreat now, and worry about Zala later. If we can get retreat at all?" She waited for feedback.

Fortescue said, "If we can just get outside this building, high-powered help might arrive sooner than you'd think."

"Ah?" Black Lotus raised her eyebrows at him.

"I have no real power, but my employer _does._ If I can summon her attention, she has ways of moving people quickly from one place to another."

The others must have thought he was speaking of Marie LaVeau in New Orleans. I knew he meant someone else—Amora the Enchantress and her ally Dreamqueen. Presumably he'd been searched for communications devices and supernatural equivalents the same way we had been, but Enchantress must have anticipated all that when she recruited him (and later me) to investigate on her behalf. There must be some way for him to report back to them in an emergency, or for them to monitor his movements from afar.

My best guess was that the building we were in was "jammed" against the supernatural equivalent of telecommunications. The surrounding area (city, country, or wherever we were) presumably was more "normal." Perhaps Amora would automatically "see" Fortescue the moment he stepped outside the building's defenses? (Failing that, a simple phone call to a prearranged number might do the trick—if he could find a phone.)

"Give us a map," Anarchy said.

Fortescue pulled out a ballpoint pen and began making lines on a scrap of paper. "We're here . . . Pavane was on guard there . . . Titania is by the stairwell door there . . . they've got the heavy equipment set up way over there . . ."

"Only one staircase?" Anarchy demanded. "No fire exits; no elevators?"

"Not that I've seen," Fortescue said cautiously. "I wasn't exactly encouraged to open every door in sight."

"Bottleneck," Anarchy growled. "Only way out, so of course they have it corked."

"Sooner or later someone will expect to hear from Pavane," Fortescue pointed out.

Titania was supposed to be the physical equivalent of She-Hulk. Lifting dozens of tons without breaking a sweat; bulletproof skin; as far as such non-powered persons as ourselves were concerned, she might as well be considered the classic Immovable Object. Which, of course, was why she was on guard duty at the only exit in the first place.

"The problem is taking shape," Anarchy said. "We want to get Lady C out of here as quickly as possible. We need the staircase or the elevator. I suspect the staircase is safer, if we can get past Titania. But getting past her is going to require considerable amounts of luck, force, or guile. I'm not counting on the luck. Force seems unlikely, unless we can somehow quickly and quietly liberate our more powerful comrades in arms before our captors realize anything is amiss." She looked at Fortescue. "What are the odds?"

"Terrible," he said immediately. "At least two members of Tektos was guarding that area at all times, and Abominatrix and the others are in special restraints, so they wouldn't be able to help right away. We'd be sure to make a lot of noise and draw the fire of everyone else faster than we liked."

Anarchy nodded. "I didn't think it would be that easy to shift the balance of power. Which leaves guile? You're the only one of us who's not supposed to be locked up right now."

Fortescue scratched his cheek. "Titania is no genius—but she knows I'm _not_ in the local chain of command. If I try to give her orders to move elsewhere, she'll wonder why I'm the one passing them along. I might fake an emergency—a fire; a jailbreak; yelling about a bomb? Any of those might draw her out of position for a minute—but not for long, and there'd probably be lots of noise—me yelling, her yelling, someone yelling—to draw other people's attention."

He chewed on it. "One person might get through, up the stairs and out of the building. I don't know if there would be more guards at the top. Or locked doors, for that matter. But all of us at once? Carrying Cathode? Not attracting any attention at all? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Or . . . what if the one person were disguised as someone Titania knew? Are there any of you who could pass for members of the opposing force?"

"Not Pavane," I said immediately. "She doesn't wear any sort of mask or headgear."

"Phantazia wears a mask over her eyes," Fortescue mused. "Mist Mistress might be best—have you seen her? I think she's your size, Esprit, and the same creamy skin. That shiny helmet covers most of her head, except for mouth and jaw. Also, she has long brown hair coming out from under her helmet. If we got the drop on her and then sheared her head, could we make those long locks into a makeshift wig somehow?"

Black Lotus said, "I have some knowledge of such matters. If we can obtain a strong, fast-drying adhesive . . ."

"I can provide that," Anarchy agreed.

I was starting to see the shape of things to come. If Fortescue wasn't talking through his hat about all this, then my height, build, and skin were almost perfect matches for Mist Mistress's. Anarchy was taller; Lotus and Cathode had coloring and features from the Far East; Yvonne also had a darker complexion than mine, and was a bit shorter to boot. Mrs. Jarroway, the cook, was definitely the wrong size. If we found and replaced Mist Mistress, I was elected by default. Then I would try to bluff my way past Titania, hopefully with Fortescue's help, and then . . . well, I was still shaky on what I'd do after I got outside, but presumably Fortescue would have given me some quick instructions by then on how to call for help and get it in a hurry.

"Just where is Mist Mistress?" Black Lotus demanded.

Fortescue shrugged. "I'm not sure, but I can probably find out. If they haven't found Pavane yet, then no one will think twice when I stroll past, looking for someone. If they have found her, I will just have to play dumb and hope they blame someone else."

He looked around the room. "Anyone have a better plan? No? Then I'd better get moving."

He slid out into the hallway and vanished from our ken. This waiting was the hardest part of what was going on. I almost would have preferred a quick fight at this point—win or lose, at least the matter would be settled quickly. But we'd probably lose. Picking off the enemy one at a time (well, one enemy, thus far) was more discreet, but much slower. And we couldn't expect it to work for very long.

No one wanted to talk while we waited. I kept telling myself no news was good news. Surely there would be a hue and cry if anyone guessed we were out of the cells?

Then Fortescue entered quietly. "Ladies, I think it's time for Esprit to commence her masquerade. The good news is that it will be _easier_ than we thought for her to pass as Mist Mistress. But there's a complication . . ."


	23. Chapter 23: Impersonating

**Chapter Twenty-Three: Impersonating**

None of us swallowed the bait by _begging_ him to explain. We all just stared at Fortescue and waited for him to clarify his opening remark. He took the hint pretty quickly, I must say.

"Here's what I've got. Our captors are about to send one operative into another dimensional reality, looking for someone. Their unseen 'boss,' I gather. The operative will wear a sealed environmental suit in case she lands in some place that's conspicuously lacking an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. They selected Mist Mistress. Possibly because if she runs into something really weird and scary, she can turn into vapor to evade its attacks. In a few minutes, the lady will be in a dressing room, pulling on the suit. We could probably overcome her and make a switch.

"The upside is that wearing this environmental suit will make it impossible to spot differences between Mist Mistress and Esprit. The downside is that to maintain the deception, she has to let them zap her into some weirdo alternate reality on a search-and-rescue mission. Titania is still guarding the door to the stairwell. She's no genius, but if she sees 'Mist Mistress' walking toward her, obviously headed outside, she will smell a rat."

I said, "All right, so I can impersonate one of our captors, but I can't just walk out the front door as fast as we planned. I might be able to throw a monkey wrench in whatever they are planning, though. If I do, then the question is—do the rest of you just stay right here and wait until I'm back from my dimensional jaunt, or do you develop a Plan B and try to lure Titania out of position long enough for Fortescue to make it outside and call in the cavalry?"

Anarchy asked, "But you are willing to take the risk of visiting strange new worlds?"

"Yes," I said. "You already convinced me that anything beats sitting in a cell waiting for someone else to decide what to do with us."

"Valiant," Cathode said approvingly, "but in that case _you_ don't need to know in advance what _we_ will do after you have been sent far, far away for an indefinite period."

I opened my mouth—and closed it. Cathode had a point. "Need to Know," and all that jazz. If I was going to spend the next hour (or whatever) in some other plane of existence, I couldn't do much to help escape plans right here on Earth. And what I didn't know, I couldn't spill if interrogated.

For a long time now, I had been trying to identify a chance to call Captain America or any of the Avengers so they could crack down on the villains I kept encountering. Unfortunately, I'd been kept too-well watched and isolated for that to ever become practical. And once again, I was about to find myself in a position where I wouldn't have any hope of picking up a phone and yelling for help. Now the best I could _hope for_ was that Cathode's forces would manage to get Titania distracted long enough for Fortescue to slip out of this place, and that he managed to get a call for help out to Dreamqueen and Enchantress, and that they felt the need to answer in a timely fashion, and that they came (perhaps with minions I had never met) with sufficient force to clean things up, and that they treated me decently after they had won . . . there were far too many assumptions here for my peace of mind, but I didn't see anything else I could do to tilt the scales the right way.

I'll summarize the next bit. For once, it went like clockwork. Fortescue went ahead, Black Lotus and I followed, and we made it to what he'd called the "dressing room" where Mist Mistress was starting to climb into a bulky white thing. Fortescue flirted with her for a moment—then when he used a codeword indicating she was facing away from the door, Lotus slid inside and stunned her with one swift strike. I clambered into the environmental suit. It had a reflective faceplate and was generally so baggy that _anyone_, male or female, could have been inside it, provided they were _about _my height. It even had a utility belt which included a handgun, a cigarette lighter, a large knife, and some miscellaneous tools and items. If I needed to cut a rope in a hurry, or set something on fire, I'd be ready!

Then Fortescue took my arm and gently guided me down a corridor and around a corner and through a large door to a vast chamber in which some of our captors were assembled. There was a square metal platform, about about ten feet on a side, standing off to the left of the entrance. Its surface was unadorned. However, it was connected by cables to other equipment—what looked like a mainframe computer, and elaborate control panels, and also something reminiscent of a large electrical generator, although somehow I didn't think the gadget's purpose was just to provide juice. Near the control panels was what looked like a huge television, with a screen taller than I was. It was turned on, and currently showing odd swirls of color as if many different shades of mist were trying to push each other around in a never-ending battle for dominance.

Phantazia was standing in the center of the chamber in a dramatic pose, hands on hips, feet well apart. Four members of Tektos were scattered around the area. I knew Fractal and Fugue; I thought the other two were Bubble and Shrapnel. There were also five people who apparently were here as technicians; fiddling with controls and staring at display screens and speaking to each other in jargon which didn't make much sense to a laywoman such as myself.

"Hang on a moment longer, Misty!" Phantazia said to me. "We want to improve the focus just a tad more before you stroll through that thing."

"A moment longer" turned out to be another eleven minutes. I was not surprised; I had spent enough time around Fabian Stankowicz and other technical support staff at Avengers Mansion to know how these things go. After a while, there was a chaotic image on the giant screen which didn't look a heck of a lot better than before to my untrained eyes, but seemed highly satisfying to those who presumably knew what they were doing.

Then Phantazia had to make a speech, partially to make sure "I" (Mist Mistress) remembered all the key protocols for what was about to happen, and partially because she just seemed to feel this momentous occasion deserved some oratory. You would have thought she were running for public office. I'll spare you the full text. It appeared that Fortescue had been right. The default plan was that if the environmental suit got badly damaged, Mist Mistress would go to her gaseous condition (in which she didn't need to breathe at regular intervals) and wait to be retrieved by her cabal's teleport technology. Self-evaporation wasn't really an option in my case, but I didn't feel like explaining that. Fortunately, no one expected me to respond vocally from inside my airtight suit.

I stood there listening to the speech about the majesty of the moment, the importance of the quest, the vast rewards we all expected to receive after "the Boss" had taken her rightful place in this world, and so forth . . . and then it was time for me to step onto the platform and wait to be teleported. Phantazia had made sure I knew which control to manipulate to send a hyperdimensional pulse when I wanted to be "reeled back in," hopefully with "the Boss" in tow. I gathered that whoever she was, she had gotten herself _badly_ lost in the depths of the omniverse!

I had serious doubts about the wisdom of bringing the mysterious Boss back—and I did wonder why no one ever mentioned her name, if they even knew it?—but I stepped onto the platform when Phantazia finally gave me the go-ahead, and waited to be launched out on my fishing expedition to some unearthly milieu. One technician yanked at a lever—


	24. Chapter 24: Statue

**Chapter Twenty-Four: Statue**

I'm not sure what I expected, but what I _got_ was a strobe effect. Different realities seemed to be flashing all around me, too fast for me to retain more than a few odd images, such as one thing on a horizon which appeared to be a castle carved out of one mass of white crystal—and then the fluctuation stopped just as I was getting used to it. Now I was standing in some world that appeared to be all elevated walkways and vertical connecting pieces and such, without any "solid ground" to provide a foundation for the haphazard network of paths. Imagine finding yourself in a gigantic "spider web" such as might have been woven by some spider whose work wasn't sticky, and who didn't feel the slightest need to have the sides of the web anchored to anything in particular, and who moved around freely in all three dimensions instead of having the web form a regular pattern in a single plane, and perhaps you'll begin to visualize what I saw all around me.

I took a few experimental steps. The gravity seemed to be consistently pulling "down," toward something beneath my feet . . . but when I peered over the edge of the walkway, I didn't see anything "down there" except more walkways at various levels, and beyond that . . . just void?

The sky around me was a dull blue-grey overhead, gradually shifting to a muted purple as I lowered my gaze. After studying my surroundings in all directions, I decided that the only "building" in sight was a few hundred yards away and a bit higher than my current location, but a fairly direct path should get me there soon without any need to test my luck at leaping from one walkway to another while wearing an environmental suit.

To get there, I would have to pass through what looked like a doorway – just a hollow rectangle with nothing inside—and walk past an area that was burning steadily, like a giant brazier, for no reason I could discern at first glance. It didn't seem to be needed for illumination; I could see clearly in any direction, although there wasn't anything I'd call a "sun" or "moon" visible in the sky.

There was no visible purpose to the doorway. It reminded me of the metal detectors in airports, but I decided trying to find a way past it was probably futile, so I marched right through. Nothing happened. (Or I couldn't tell the difference if it did?)

The path I followed led to a doorway in one side of the building. Again, there was no actual door blocking my path. However, I didn't take that as an invitation to just march right in. Instead, I rapped one gloved hand on the frame a few times, and then called out, "Hello! Anybody home?"

Then I waited.

Someone came into view at the end of a corridor and sauntered toward me. He was shaped like a man of average height, but I'd never met anyone with just that shade of pale green skin before, and his eyes seemed to lack irises and pupils. His thick black eyebrows slanted above his eyes and then twisted around to run upwards across his forehead. He was wearing a yellow suit which covered everything but his head and hands, and it had an elaborate brown collar rising to points on each side behind his head.

I slowly held up my gloved hands, palms forward, to show I was not brandishing any weapons, while saying, "I come in peace." I thought of repeating the sentiment in a few other languages, but decided to hold off on that.

His mouth moved and he made noises which I assumed to be language—but not like any language I'd ever heard before. Certainly nothing from the Romance or Germanic groups.

I said, "I'm sorry, I don't understand that."

He made some elaborate gestures, while saying something else I didn't understand at first. But in mid-sentence, it suddenly shifted to: "—familiar. Are you from the same realm as Doctor Strange?"

"We live in the same city, but I have never met him," I said truthfully. "Did you learn English from him?"

"Not exactly," the green-faced man said. "He was using a translation spell when he visited my realm, long ago. I thought I remembered enough about its aura to repeat the effect today. I am not speaking your language, but your ears _think_ I am, and then I hear your replies in _my_ native tongue." He paused. "Did all that come through clearly?"

I nodded—then realized nonverbal cues might have different meanings in this bizarre realm, and said, "It was very clear!"

He cocked his head. "That thing you're wearing muffles your voice, though. This won't hurt—"

He made another set of gestures, and this time some sort of light or energy flashed from his fingers to the upper portion of my haz-mat suit. Then it was gone—but my head appeared to have nothing around it. The air against my face still felt and smelled like the stuff the suit had been providing, though. I reached up toward my face—and found I was only tapping my helmet.

"Your headgear is still solid, serving whatever function it was meant for. It is merely transparent to light and sound for a short time," the sorcerer said.

I made a show out of running my gloves over everything—front, back, sides, top—and said, "Amazing! I've never seen anything like this before!"

The green-faced man preened a bit. (I was assuming his body language was roughly equivalent to a _human_ male's.) "A mere trifle for a true master of the mystic arts," he said. "I do not perceive that you have any strengths in that direction. Were you sent here as a messenger from some puissant mage of your own plane?"

I shook my head—then realized nonverbal cues might be different here. "No, I was sent here by a piece of sophisticated technology." Looking at him, I wasn't sure that last word had translated to anything he was familiar with, so I defined it. "An elaborate device which any living being could build and operate, if they knew how—without needing any spells."

"Oh, one of _those_ toys." (If the translation spell was handling nuances well, then his tone implied that high-tech tools were for infantile mentalities.) "But I forget myself. I am Lord Tazza, ruler of this twilight realm at the very edges of infinity."

I hadn't even known infinity had edges, but saw nothing to gain by debating the point. "I am Free Spirit, a humble visitor. I don't expect to stay here very long."

"Which returns us to the question of why you are here at all," he observed. "Why did your master take the trouble to project you all the way to my realm?"

Good question. Lying to him at this early stage wasn't likely to get me anywhere, especially since for all I knew he might already have some spell operating which would let him smell a lie in a flash. And it wasn't as if I actually _wanted_ to achieve the mission which Phantazia had assigned to Mist Mistress. So I was going to be truthful with him—but the main question was how much of the background material to skip as being of no interest to Tazza.

"Not my master," I corrected. "Supposedly I was sent here to find some powerful entity, female, who has been communicating with certain criminals on my native world. Apparently she has made large promises for rewarding them if they can liberate her from . . . something." Tazza appeared to be clouding up, and I finished quickly, "That is why _they_ sent me here, but I don't actually want to take her back home with me!"

Tazza stared at me intently for a long moment. "You came all this way _not_ to free my captive? Your motivations seem . . . confused."

"My motivations are pretty simple," I disagreed. "I want to enforce the law and preserve the peace in my homeland. But I _disguised_ myself as one of the criminals in an attempt to escape from their lair undetected. I have little interest in any prisoners you keep, unless there is someone who should be returned to my homeland. Which seems unlikely, out here at the edges of infinity?"

He turned away abruptly, saying, "Follow me," and strode quickly back the way he had come. I followed, reflecting that it was a little surprising he had turned his back on me, unless he had already decided I was incapable of harming him—or quite possibly was baiting a trap which would spring shut if I jumped at this opportunity. It didn't really matter, since I wasn't looking for a fight. After I had followed him around bends and through a couple of chambers, all of them apparently designed by an architect who had _no use_ for such outlandish concepts as "straight lines," "right angles," and "bilateral symmetry," we found ourselves in a large chamber which was adorned by only two items of note: a pale square, standing on edge and about three feet on a side, hovering above the ground; and a life-size statue of what I tentatively tagged "a female demon."

The statue was about my size, and shaped roughly like myself, but with membranes resembling bat-wings running along the underside of the arms and down the outer sides of the legs, as if for flying. The membranes weren't large enough for anything of human mass to get any real benefit from them in a one-G environment, but that might not be a problem where the model for this statue had grown up. She wore a long red garment that left her arms and legs bare, but the rest of her was "covered" by a leathery yellow-brown hide, and there were several very thick tendrils, almost tentacles, rising from her head where I would normally expect a woman's hair to be. She was in a dramatic pose which looked very hard to maintain, but not a single muscle was so much as quivering, and her eyes weren't reacting to our arrival, so I had quickly assumed she was, in fact, a statue.

Tazza gestured toward the statue. "This has been the only other resident of my realm for some time now. Over the ages I had collected many other intruders and separated their minds from their bodies for safekeeping, but then a man called Doctor Strange visited, and we clashed, for I had been deceived by Dormammu into thinking he meant to destroy me. Doctor Strange won, but proved Dormammu a liar by sparing my life and leaving me in control of my realm when he departed, although I lost my erstwhile collection of trophies after they were restored to their former selves. Doctor Strange did insist, however, that I should be a tad more . . . polite . . . to future visitors. I have made an effort. For instance, you are still ambulatory since you offered no challenge to my authority. However, when this female materialized before me some time later, she instantly lashed out with powerful magics in an attempt to kill or enslave me, and I defended myself in my customary fashion and began a new collection. Since then, things have been very quiet."

I chewed on that for a moment. "So you think her spirit must have found just enough power to send messages back to my world, creating some sort of trail which could be followed here?"

Tazza nodded. "I had not realized she retained even that much ability. I have no particular use for her, but I am loath to release her for a rematch."

"On the other hand," I observed, "if I don't carry her back, the people who sent me here will demand explanations from me, and I don't know what would satisfy them."

Tazza shrugged. My problems at home were no concern of his.

Then it hit me. When I had hammered out a bargain with Amora the Enchantress, she had not provided me any way to call her up in a hurry. Probably because any mystic artifact she gave me, or any lingering spell she placed upon me, was bound to be detected by the people whom Fortescue and I were supposed to infiltrate. Fortescue presumably knew a way to reach her—a regular phone number or something—but he wasn't here. However, Tazza might have his own ways of placing the supernatural, multidimensional equivalent of a long-distance call, if I asked nicely.

I said to him, "I am temporarily in the service of two women of powerful magics—not the same people who sent me here. If you could help me establish contact with them, I think they would be grateful."

"That is much, much easier if the sorcerer already knows the person he wishes to speak to, or at least the relative . . . position . . . of their current abode," Tazza said. "Who are these women?"

"One of them is Amora of Asgard, often called The Enchantress."

He shook his head. "None of those names mean anything out here."

"The other is The Dreamqueen—"

Tazza stiffened. "The daughter of Nightmare?"

I had no idea. I began to describe her—the bone-white skin, the green curls, the red bodysuit slashed open down the middle . . .

Tazza cut me off with a scornful look. "For the daughter of a succubus and a Fear Lord, physical appearance is an unreliable identifier. But I remember encountering a female who _may_ be the same 'Dreamqueen' you mention . . . we shall see what we shall see." He turned toward the floating white square and spoke two syllables. It flared up like a television set coming on, and then that pale, sneering face, framed by emerald hair and two long red horns, appeared in front of us.

"Hail, Dreamqueen!" Tazza said. "I, Lord Tazza, have found something which may be yours!" He gestured in my direction.

"Hail, Lord of the Twilight Realm!" replied Dreamqueen, sounding noticeably politer than she had the other day. "Yes, I recognize that headstrong child! My ally Amora recently persuaded her to do us a service." Her eyes locked onto mine. "What do you have to report?" Then her gaze drifted past me and she added, "Is that _Vera Gemini_?"

* * *

**Notes on the Characters:**

**Tazza** appeared in a Dr. Strange story in "Strange Tales #144." He lived in, and ruled—in the sense that _no other_ permanent residents were around to argue the point, if we didn't count his collection of travelers-turned-into-statues—a weird dimensional realm described as being "in the twilight area on the edges of infinity." (Who knew "infinity" even _had_ "edges"? Silver Age comics are so educational!)

To the best of my knowledge, Tazza has _never_ been seen or heard from again in any comic book. But when I decided the person Free Spirit is seeking must have been exiled to some non-terrestrial dimensional reality, preferably one "very far away" as such things are measured, I decided Tazza's lonely realm was about as remote from anywhere else as she could possibly have landed. So in keeping with my tradition of trying to find half-baked excuses to drag incredibly obscure characters into this serial, I drafted Tazza for special duty.

**Vera Gemini** was a human/demon hybrid; the villainous leader of a cult called "the Agents of Fortune" in a three-part story arc called "Xenogenesis" in the original "Defenders" title (#'s 58-60). That story ended when she was sent off . . . somewhere, but we never knew where . . . by a "shadow-cloak" which Patsy Walker (Hellcat) had recently acquired (by taking it away from another member of the cult). That was in 1978. Vera has _never_ been heard from since, but there was nothing in the story to suggest she was gravely wounded, or had suddenly lost her inherent magical abilities, or anything else that would handicap her for long. So after I decided (many months before I wrote this chapter) that Vera was the Unseen Boss of one of the groups Free Spirit has been tangling with, I had to figure out where she went in 1978 and why she hadn't been able to use her own magic, or that of her demonic masters, to make a comeback _long before_ the mid-90s. Which was what led me to Tazza.


	25. Chapter 25: Substitution

**Author's Note:** Yes, this is a very short chapter by my standards. Months ago I wrote it in a dreadful hurry as a contest entry for another site, and then I pretty much forgot about it. But now I'm offering it here, for anyone who is actually still following this long-running, intermittently-updated serial.

* * *

**Chapter Twenty-Five: Substitution**

Tazza waved the question away. "She appeared out of a rift, attacked me, and I defended myself. There were no introductions."

"I think she is by way of being a distant cousin," Dreamqueen mused, tapping one long, pallid finger against her equally snow-white cheek. "_Very_ distant. Several millennia removed, one might say."

Tazza scowled. "You mean you want her back?"

"'Back?' I have never spoken to her in my life. What the mortal breeds call 'family ties' have remarkably little meaning to my kind. It was merely an amusing coincidence that young Free Spirit seems to have tracked down one of my own 'long-lost relatives.' But for all of me, she may stay 'lost' indefinitely!"

Tazza, although apparently a long-time hermit and misanthrope judging by what he had told me earlier about his preference for living in this realm all alone, still seemed slightly taken aback by this attitude, but he didn't say so. I kept my own opinions to myself as well. If my family were largely composed of demons, I might feel differently about them, after all. Dreamqueen was already moving on to another subject, staring at me and saying, "Report what you have learned!"

"Is Amora the Enchantress available?" I inquired. "Having her listen would save me the trouble of saying it all twice."

I still don't know if Dreamqueen had hoped to learn something juicy from me which might give her an advantage over her ostensible ally, or if she just had so little experience in alliances that it honestly hadn't occurred to her to invite Amora to listen in on a mystical conference call, or what. But she chose to take my suggestion rather than argue the point. Amora's face appeared in the mystic window alongside Dreamqueen's, and then I started reporting.

For at least a quarter of an hour I spoke, almost uninterrupted, to an audience of three, although Tazza didn't offer any opinions on what he was hearing. I didn't work for him and he had no reason to care what might happen on my native Earth, but he didn't actually leave the room while I was talking, either. I did my best to hit all the high points of what Fortescue and I had seen and heard and done since we left Dreamqueen's realm.

Then Enchantress asked my opinion on what should happen next. I doubt she really cared, but at least she was polite enough to ask.

My first suggestion was that Enchantress should find a way to signal the Avengers and let them handle it from there. Enchantress argued that she still didn't know where the secret base was from whence I had been teleported to Tazza's realm, so telling the Avengers that some such base existed, somewhere on Earth, wouldn't bring about a speedy resolution to the problem. I gathered she was reluctant to put any sort of magical "tracer" on me which might lead them back to the lair of Phantazia and her friends, for fear that one member of that cabal would detect the tracer very quickly.

On the other hand, it quickly became clear that Enchantress and Dreamqueen were of one mind on a key point: the stolen technomagick server should _not_ be left intact for irresponsible mortals to use (which apparently meant _any_ mortals, as far as they were concerned). They would settle for having it destroyed rather than trying to capture it intact for themselves, however.

I thanked my lucky stars that evidently neither of those two knew anything about computers, else they might have shown more interest in seizing it for future use. The chances that these two prima donnas would mutually agree to recruit and trust a third person as an equal partner in their alliance were, I felt certain, remote.

My first idea having been shot down, I elected to keep quiet and wait to hear other options suggested.

"They are expecting their distant leader to abruptly become less distant," The Enchantress mused. "We must presume that at least some of them know what to expect as the 'natural semblance' of Vera Gemini. They may well expect her to manifest some of her arcane prowess shortly after arrival in their secret lair, so as to dispel any suspicion of a counterfeit trying to replace the authentic. In their shoes, I should certainly insist upon a few proofs."

The Dreamqueen frowned. "You are not suggesting that one of us take my cousin's place, are you?"

"Nay, indeed not. But it might be feasible to contrive some other substitution . . ." Amora's voice trailed off as she looked at me speculatively. Then she said, more-or-less graciously: "Free Spirit, you do not need to know the details of what we are about to say. If Lord Tazza will be kind enough to direct you to some place where you may rest quietly, perhaps attend to miscellaneous needs of the body . . ."

Tazza nodded, waved one hand in an elaborate gesture, and instructed me to follow the green arrow which was now hovering in mid-air at about the level of my chin. As I moved toward it, the arrow advanced to stay a few feet ahead of me. It guided me through a doorway and then veered left down a curving corridor.

As I moved down the corridor I could already hear Tazza, Amora, and The Dreamqueen chattering away in some language I couldn't make heads nor tails of.

After about five minutes of walking, I found what appeared to be a kitchen area, and a few steps away the door to what seemed to be a bathroom. However, I didn't do anything with the plumbing or the stores of what appeared to be food, because that would have required taking off my haz-mat suit, and I didn't remember anyone giving a guarantee that the local air was perfectly safe for a red-blooded human girl to breathe!

After a while—perhaps an hour and a quarter?—the green arrow started flashing and then guided me back to the same room in Tazza's palace. The square which seemed to serve as a magical telecommunications screen was now empty of any imagery.

Vera Gemini—or what appeared to be her—was still standing in the same pose as before, but Tazza told me to grasp the statue's wrist and then commence the protocols, so I took it for granted that some sort of substitution had been arranged, and Tazza's real trophy/prisoner was stashed away somewhere else for the time being.

I grabbed Vera's wrist and then started pushing certain controls on the belt of my suit, as Phantazia had instructed me to do for the return trip . . .


	26. Chapter 26: Unsealed

**Chapter Twenty-Six: Unsealed**

After I sent the signal to be taken back to my native Earth, I suppose I expected the strobe effect (fleeting glimpses of one alien world after another) from my journey to Tazza's realm to replay itself in reverse as my passenger and I went back the other way.

Didn't happen that way. Most of the return trip had me surrounded by meaningless swirls and flashes of color, as if someone had embedded me in a kaleidoscope and then started shaking vigorously.

Then we passed through an environment of total darkness for at least four seconds.

Finally we emerged back in the secret lair where Phantazia and her technicians were waiting. During my long absence, there'd been some turnover in the Tektos presence, however; Fugue was still there, and a guy who was probably Karbon, but three other members must've gotten bored and wandered out.

Phantazia only had eyes for "Vera Gemini," which was just as well—if she'd expected me to carry on an intelligent conversation, she might have noticed something wrong with my voice or syntax, even when I was speaking through the helmet of the haz-mat suit.

"Go change, Misty," Phantazia said absently, already fixated on the motionless form I'd brought back, and making gestures at it which had no effect that I could see. "I need to probe this spell for a bit before I find the right way to disrupt it without hurting the woman inside."

I headed for the dressing room where we'd left the real Mist Mistress. I was not terribly surprised to find she wasn't there; my temporary allies must have relocated her so that no stray passers-by would trip over her body and think something fishy was going on.

My allies had not, however, left behind her costume, nor her hair cut off and turned into a wig. That eliminated the hope of disguising myself as Mist Mistress the way we'd discussed. Which meant that if I took off the haz-mat suit and then showed my face outside this room, I'd spotted as an escaped prisoner by the first member of the cabal to come along.

I shucked the suit anyway. Walking around in it now that the mission was completed would also look suspicious, and if I had to fight, that bulky thing would just handicap me.

On the other hand, the pistol and the knife might come in handy. I wasn't eager to shoot anybody, but it beat them killing me.

I wasted a few minutes searching the room, trying to see if Fortescue or Black Lotus or one of the others had left behind any sort of message for me. A scrap of paper would be nice, but I'd settle for less. Something written in the dust on top of a piece of furniture, for instance.

Either they hadn't left any such message, or else it was too subtle for me. Which left me to fall back on my own judgment. Was I better off just waiting in this room and hoping to kayo the first person who poked her head in, or should I try to make a run for it?

Not knowing my location was a strong point against counting on the "make a run for it strategy" to amount to anything.

Another point was my near-certainty that Dreamqueen and Amora had turned the Vera Gemini statue into a Trojan Horse. When Phantazia found a way to crack the petrification spell, it was likely to blow up in her face.

Perhaps literally?

I didn't know the details, but it seemed likely that whatever happened would create a large distraction which could be used to my advantage.

So I chose to wait in the undecorated little room which was only a "dressing room" by courtesy. Sooner or later, something would happen—an intrusion into the room, or a loud noise in the distance, or a power failure, or something—and I'd know it was time to act.

Therefore, I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

(Yes, this was getting monotonous.)

Then came a sound like a thunderclap. I decided to wait at least one minute before moving—in order to give any bad guys elsewhere in this HQ enough time to run toward the sound of the disturbance, so they'd be less likely to see me taking off in the other direction.

As usual with my spur-of-the-moment plans, it didn't quite happen that way. All of a sudden there was no longer a concrete wall separating this room from the bigger one where I had left Phantazia and "Vera Gemini."

No explosion; no shock wave; no shrapnel flying through the air; the wall just . . . ceased to exist. Phantazia and Fugue had their backs to me; they were confronting a woman who looked more like an aerobics instructor than a dangerous magic-user. She had long, wavy blond hair and was wearing a scoop-necked, sleeveless purple leotard, coordinated with pale pink tights on her legs. There was something brown strapped around her ankles and lower calves, as if to provide a little extra support. I admit that, unlike most aerobics instructors, this lady was hovering about three feet above the floor and had yellow energy shimmering around both hands.

"Free!" she cried. "Did you think to taunt me to my face, bringing me out into fresh air just long enough to gloat? Know your folly now!" She waved her left hand and a technician vanished into thin air, along with the desk and computer which the poor woman had been standing next to.

Phantazia was probably doing something with her own powers, but I couldn't tell. At any rate, she was also trying sweet reason: "Woman, I _released_ you from that binding spell! Why assume I am your enemy?"

A yellow beam streaked from the blond's right hand toward Phantazia and then seemed to dissipate a few inches away from its target. Meanwhile, the spellcaster was saying loudly, "You may have some ability, mortal, but you lack the resources to subjugate a true Spellbinder!"

I was getting a very bad feeling about this. Phantazia and the blond seemed to be talking right past each other; I didn't think the blond was actually listening to anything Phantazia was saying. Seemed like a good time for me to run out the door of the dressing room while those high-powered women were keeping each other busy . .

* * *

.**Author's Note:**

The new arrival who was magically disguised as a statue-ized Vera Gemini is actually Erica Fortune, also known as "Spellbinder." She had a six-part miniseries in the late 80s, followed by a five-part serial in the pages of "Marvel Comics Presents" in 1993. Erica was originally a very nice person, but it turned out that the more you use Spellbinder powers, the crazier you get. Irreversibly, I gather. When last seen, Erica was being imprisoned inside a magically-created crystal cage by her younger brother Roy (the potential for being a Spellbinder seems to run in the family). Then he deliberately destroyed the mystic items which had made him able to hold his own against Erica's rampage (I think they may have channeled and focused the latent power he otherwise wouldn't have been able to use effectively?) so that he wouldn't be tempted to keep using that great power over and over until he ended up as dangerously insane as his poor sister.

To the best of my knowledge, Erica the Spellbinder has never done anything in any other comic book story since 1993. I am told that Erica was one of many obscure characters who were briefly _mentioned_ in "Civil War: Battle Damage Report," but her status was listed as "Undetermined." In other words, we didn't see her running around loose, freed from her crystal prison. The brief mention of her simply acknowledged that the U.S. government still had a _file_ on her, but _didn't know_ where she was or what the heck had happened to her! (My best guess: Her brother never bothered to file an official report about how he'd imprisoned his big sister as a way to keep her from destroying the world or whatever she had in mind.)

I simply assume that by the time of this serial fanfic, Amora the Enchantress had somehow obtained that crystal prison and set it aside for a rainy day, on the theory that sooner or later she might want to have Erica unleashed in _somebody else's_ back yard and see how much trouble she could cause. Sort of like having your own little nuclear hand grenade, I suppose.


End file.
